The misunderstood humor of political memes
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VP Kamala Harris has been the subject of many, many coconut tree memes.
Chris duMond/Getty Images/Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images
From the attempted assassination of former President Trump, to President Biden dropping out of the election, and VP Kamala Harris stepping up... The news these past few weeks has been buck wild. And the energy online is similarly unhinged. But what do most people get wrong when they try to interpret the latest explosion of political memes? And what do these posts actually say about how people are processing major events? And are there consequences to just posting through it? Host Brittany Luse is joined by Tatum Hunter, consumer tech reporter at The Washington Post, and Kyle Chayka, staff writer at The New Yorker, to discuss what meaning could possibly be gleaned from the meme madness.
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From the attempted assassination of former President Trump, to President Biden dropping out of the election, and VP Kamala Harris stepping up... The news these past few weeks has been buck wild. And the energy online is similarly unhinged. But what do most people get wrong when they try to interpret the latest explosion of political memes? And what do these posts actually say about how people are processing major events? And are there consequences to just posting through it? Host Brittany Luse is joined by Tatum Hunter, consumer tech reporter at The Washington Post, and Kyle Chayka, staff writer at The New Yorker, to discuss what meaning could possibly be gleaned from the meme madness.
Transcript
BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hello. Hello. I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: This week, we're connecting the dots between coconuts, frogs and presidents. I know, I know. How are all these things connected? Well, we're gonna find out with Tatum Hunter, consumer tech reporter at The Washington Post, and Kyle Chayka, staff writer at The New Yorker. Tatum, Kyle, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
TATUM HUNTER: Thank you.
KYLE CHAYKA: Thanks for having me.
LUSE: Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. OK, so with everything going on this year, have you been posting through it?
CHAYKA: I've been posting a lot, unfortunately.
(LAUGHTER)
CHAYKA: I think my most infamous post personally so far has been complaining that my farmers market trip was disrupted by the news that Joe Biden was dropping out.
LUSE: (Laughter).
HUNTER: I have been posting through it on the close friends, which is a small collection of the girlies, other writers and people I have a crush on - sometimes, all three.
LUSE: You're low-key posting through it.
HUNTER: I'm low-key posting through it.
LUSE: It's good to be honest here. This is a circle of trust, just us and the thousands and thousands of people who are listening right now. (Laughter) But, I mean, memes have been a big talking point in the presidential race these last few weeks. There's coconuts, a couch. the Charli XCX album "Brat," which my 68-year-old mom is now trying to listen to. And I want to get into the political power of memes in this moment. But before we get into deep, dark, thoughtful depths...
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LUSE: ...What has been the most memorable meme that you've seen of the last few weeks?
HUNTER: I saw a meme when I was reporting a story on reactions to the Trump assassination attempt online. And it was an image of him, you know, holding his injured ear, and it said, do not get your ears pierced at Claire's.
CHAYKA: There were some TikToks that were kind of shipping - that is, describing a fictional relationship - between Trump and Biden set to the Chappell Ron song "Casual."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CASUAL")
CHAPPELL ROAN: (Singing) It's casual if it's casual now. Baby, get me off...
LUSE: Yeah, that was definitely something to see. That was definitely something to see. I feel like the memes have been flying. Something I want to touch on is that it seems like the Harris campaign is embracing posting through it. Like, they made their X header a play on the Charli XCX "Brat" album cover, and they reference the coconut tree meme in their, like, profile's bio. How have the viral online posts helped introduce Vice President Harris as a presidential candidate?
CHAYKA: I feel like they've given her more of a personality or a public personality than she had before. I think reporting has shown that not that many Americans - or many Americans don't have a good idea of who she is, what she talks like, what her personality is. And these memes have given a framework to that and given some kind of even just a visual reference point to who Kamala is, how she dances, for example, the kinds of language she uses.
HUNTER: And I think at the same time, it's hard to say whether we're making these memes somehow based on Kamala's personality, which I think is less the case than we're kind of retrofitting our public image of Kamala to the existing cultural moment. Like, we love Chappell Roan. We love "Brat." Kamala is "Brat," and she's a Kamala-nomenon (ph).
CHAYKA: (Laughter).
HUNTER: So I think it's less of her forging her own path and more of just taking her and putting her into the zeitgeist.
LUSE: To that point that you just brought up, Tatum, like, is she kind of making a moment, or is she just meeting the moment?
HUNTER: I would say that she's meeting the moment, and now she's showing up on TikTok under, you know, her own name, saying, I heard I was on the For You page. And as we've learned with past campaigns like Bernie Sanders, it's a dangerous game to acknowledge the memery (ph) because, you know, it thrives on irony, on taking something earnest and then spinning it, so when you try to engage with it, it's very tricky.
LUSE: Yeah, it seems like a potential quagmire for the candidate and their campaign. And something else I noticed is that there seems to be a blurring between, you know, the absurdist or satirical, sarcastic, ironic posts, and also those that are sincere. And so I wonder, does the intent really matter?
CHAYKA: I feel like it doesn't, or it's more in the mind of the consumer than it is in the creator because particularly on TikTok, the creator does not really have control of where their video is distributed. Like, the algorithmic feed will send it to whoever might be vaguely interested, and it doesn't stay within the context of a political group...
LUSE: Sorry.
CHAYKA: ...Or some specific audience. So it just gets blasted out, and people take it as sincere or as insincere. I feel like a lot of them are probably just like, oh, Kamala is a new meme. It would be funny to make a fan cam edit of her. I'm going to do that, and that video will probably get a lot of promotion.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLEVANS' "FLICKER")
LUSE: We're going to take a quick break, but coming up, Kyle and Tatum get into what most people get wrong about Gen Z humor and how the joke might be on us. And later, we play a game.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLEVANS' "FLICKER")
LUSE: As you mentioned, Kyle, we're seeing some really wild memes getting put together where the creators are just taking whatever is popular right now or whatever people seem to respond to and smashing it together - like that meme that you mentioned earlier, Kyle, where, you know, they mashed Chappell Roan's song with a video of Trump and Biden making it look like they were romantically involved.
(LAUGHTER)
LUSE: I mean, these are three very hot SEO topics, you know?
CHAYKA: Yeah.
LUSE: Kyle, what are people getting wrong about this kind of, like, meme particle acceleration?
CHAYKA: Perhaps that anyone in particular has a grasp on it. So it almost feels like the candidates, the politics, the news are subordinate to the mechanics of the platform. To me, the acceleration and the promotion and the attention is its own message. And it's just whoever gets the most attention is the winner at a given moment.
HUNTER: I also think it's risky to try to iron it into a narrative 'cause the internet is so big, with so many different niche communities. So like Kyle was saying, it's very tough to tease out what any of this means. And also, the harder you try to analyze something that's absurdist, the more the joke is on you.
LUSE: It also seems like in the past, conservatives were maybe more known for their memes, like Pepe the Frog, if you recall. As another guest recently remarked on this show, conservatives are kind of more correlated with fun and humor, like, unfettered fun and humor on the internet as opposed to arch humor, whereas liberals might be more dour or sincere.
HUNTER: I think also, Donald Trump's digital media strategy has been so superior to Joe Bidens, for example. I think you chose a good word, dour, for how liberal Democrats, traditional liberal Democrats are perceived in Internet culture 'cause I think it's very much the millennial thing of this kind of earnest posting, engaging very earnestly with politics online. And I think younger folks, that doesn't really resonate with them as much, and in fact, it alienates them.
LUSE: Tatum, you're touching on the impact of the younger generation, a new, young generation of voters. I mean, you've reported on how Gen Z specifically is posting through it all. Around 41 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote this year. How are their memes and reactions and humor indicative of their read on the election?
HUNTER: I think we need to be careful not to say that, you know, this reaction to Kamala's candidacy will kind of carry over into the next phase of her election campaign because, for example, a couple weeks ago, we saw the first, you know, attempted assassination of a sitting or former president with a gun in decades and decades. We're kind of done with it now on social media feeds. So no matter how engaged people are right now with Vice President Harris, it doesn't necessarily mean that next week, something else wouldn't have grabbed the internet's attention. But also, I think some of this absurdist content really speaks to how discouraged young people are with having two candidates that don't represent their politics, especially about climate change and the war in Gaza, in many cases.
LUSE: Memes travel at a completely different speed than the news. News organizations were notably slower to confirm what happened after Trump's assassination attempt than social media posters, which is good because the journalists were fact checking and making sure that they weren't spreading disinformation. But Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic points out that that also fed, in its own way, into the conspiracy theories that we saw online. What does it mean that the media, by necessity, is always going to be slower than the online information machine?
CHAYKA: (Laughter) I think the vetting is more important than the speed in a lot of ways, and to make content that moves at the speed of the internet is to sacrifice the truth, often, and accuracy and meaning. So in this case, these events have been so significant and so era-defining that I think to make memes about them first has almost denigrated them in a lot of ways or has prevented us from making more sense of them. I mean, being on Twitter, or X, at the moment of the Trump shooting attempt, there was no waiting for information.
LUSE: Yes.
CHAYKA: I did see a good meme about this, actually, which is a sign - possibly in "SpongeBob" font, I'm not sure - but it just said, you know, the number's crossed out and it says zero days since a major historical event has happened. And I think it was the day that Biden exited his own campaign.
LUSE: Gosh.
CHAYKA: It speaks to the sheer speed and volume of these events that are - the events themselves are happening too fast for us to process them, and thus, one defense mechanism or reaction is just to kind of leave it in the dust. Like, there were posts about how Trump's shooting attempt would not matter in two weeks. And in a way, the news cycle, which is so fast now, has moved on, and everyone is just debating Kamala. Recently, I think, after the peak of the Kamala memes, JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, came in for his time in the viral spotlight, and a lot of memes were being made about him.
LUSE: Ultimately, what does it mean that a lot of us are just posting through it all now? Can we actually metabolize everything that's happening?
HUNTER: I am no psychologist, but I'm going to say no. I don't think we're capable of processing information at the speed and volume that we're getting it.
CHAYKA: I feel like the fragmentation of the news ecosystem has also really impacted this. Like, we've had two to three major events that have occurred on, like, alternating sides of the political spectrum, and the different sides understand them completely differently. So it feels a bit like there's no space in which to have that dialogue. What we're doing instead is just, like, throwing rocks back and forth or hitting the volleyball back and forth over a net that's a complete dividing barrier between people.
LUSE: Well, I mean, for myself, I don't know if I could say how healthy or effective posting through it all is, although I'm definitely continuing to do it. Tatum, Kyle, I have learned so much here. Thank you both so much.
CHAYKA: Of course.
HUNTER: Thank you.
LUSE: And as a thank you, I'd like to teach you something by playing a game with you both. Can you stick around for a tiny bit longer?
HUNTER: Yeah.
LUSE: Wonderful. All right, we'll be right back with a little game I like to call, But Did You Know? Stick around.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLEVANS' "FLICKER")
LUSE: All right, all right. We're going to play a little game I like to call But Did You Know?
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LUSE: Here's how it works. I'm going to share a story that's been making headlines this week and give you some background on that story. I'll also ask you trivia related to it. But don't worry. It's all multiple-choice. So the correct answer is in there somewhere, and the first one to blurt out the right answer gets a point. Person with the most points wins - and their prize is bragging rights. Are you ready?
CHAYKA: Yes.
HUNTER: I'm ready.
LUSE: Yes. I love to hear it. OK, first question - there have been some big blockbuster movies this summer, so I will be asking you some trivia about them. So to start, the No. 1 movie at the box office last weekend was "Deadpool & Wolverine," which - fun fact, one of the first things Deadpool says in the movie is, Marvel's so stupid. But what else can we learn from the box office faves?
The No. 4 movie last weekend was "Inside Out 2." And my question for you is, which emotion was almost part of this franchise? Is it A, schadenfreude, which is pleasure due to someone else's misfortune; B, solipsism, which is self-centeredness; or C, anhedonia, which is the absence of pleasure in something you used to like?
CHAYKA: I feel like B.
HUNTER: I'm going to say C.
LUSE: Unfortunately, you were both wrong.
(LAUGHTER)
CHAYKA: Oh, no.
(SOUNDBITE OF BUZZER)
LUSE: The answer is A, schadenfreude. They were going to add schadenfreude to the crew, with a German accent, of course. But it was cut for simplicity's sake. I also could see that being, like, a difficult emotion for children to name. (Laughter) So maybe that was for the best.
CHAYKA: Too abstract.
LUSE: Too abstract - all right. Next question - the No. 3 movie at the box office as of this taping is "Despicable Me 4." According to the lore of the "Despicable Me" franchise, which also encompasses the "Minions" universe, at what point in time were the minions created? Was it A, when Gru invented them, in 1968; B, when Dracula created them, sometime in the 1700s; or C, they evolved out of the sea fully formed before the dawn of time?
CHAYKA: I think it's C.
HUNTER: I - yeah, given what I know about them.
LUSE: Kyle says C. Tatum says C. Well, fortunately for you, Kyle, you were first with the correct answer.
(SOUNDBITE OF FANFARE)
LUSE: The answer is C. According to the "Minions" movie, they are immortal beings that are at least 60 million years old and have served evil T-rexes and ancient Egyptians in the meantime. Would either of you go for immortality if it meant that you also had to be a minion forever?
CHAYKA: No.
LUSE: Tatum, you seem conflicted. You seem conflicted.
HUNTER: Well, I don't think I'd go for immortality even if I got to be myself.
LUSE: It just seems stressful.
CHAYKA: The minion form, I think, is - that seems tough. And you also are, like, a servant to evil people, right?
LUSE: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Recap the score - Tatum, you are at zero points.
HUNTER: Ah.
LUSE: Kyle, you are at one point. So without further ado, the final question - the No. 2 movie at the box office last weekend was "Twisters." But in real life, roughly what percentage of the world's tornadoes happen in the United States? Is it A, 25%; B, 50%; or C, 75%?
HUNTER: A.
CHAYKA: I'm gonna say C.
LUSE: Kyle says C. And Kyle, you're absolutely right. The answer is C, 75%.
(SOUNDBITE OF FANFARE)
CHAYKA: I heard this on Morning Edition or something. Thank you, NPR (laughter).
LUSE: OK, we love a home station listener. Isn't that wild? Tornadoes aren't uniquely American, but they're pretty freaking American. I didn't even realize that until we were getting ready to play this game. Seventy-five percent - all right. Well, that's it for But Did You Know for this week. Congratulations to Kyle on your win.
CHAYKA: It's that NPR listening. You got to do it.
LUSE: It paid off. It finally paid off. Tatum, you know - if we all keep posting through it, you might both have to come back and duke it out again.
HUNTER: OK, good. Well, Kyle, this isn't over.
LUSE: All right. Well, Tatum, Kyle, thank you both so much for joining me today.
HUNTER: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
CHAYKA: It's always fun to talk about memes (laughter).
LUSE: That was The Washington Post's Tatum Hunter and The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by Liam McBain. This episode was edited by...
JESSICA PLACZEK, BYLINE: Jessica Placzek.
LUSE: Engineering support came from...
ROBERT RODRIGUEZ, BYLINE: Robert Rodriguez.
LUSE: Our executive producer is...
VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Veralyn Williams.
LUSE: Our VP of programming is...
YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: All right. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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