Deep-Fried Dali: Absurd Memes as Golden Nuggets for a Post-Internet Generation’s Psychology
When you’re strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you’re strange
No one remembers your name
-People are Strange, The Doors (1967)
One doesn’t have to look far past a Youtube comment section to see that anonymity brings out the worst in people. Digital darkness is a petri dish for warped creativity.
Memeland is a meritocracy. Located in the burgeoning metropolis of Internet subcultures and inside jokes, meme creators have complete autonomy in their work. There is no guarantee of popularity; the rewards for creating a good meme are dubious at best. Some venture to go “pro”– a future of social media management and making memes to advertise, essentially the digital version of someone sneaking into a party to try to sell things to people.
The Internet is a sanctuary for crippling introversion, sexual innuendoes, and strangely communal experiences. After all, laughter tends to be one of the strongest bonds that connect mutual experiences. Meme accounts are sprawling nodes for niche humor that bridge our unique life experiences into a nameless, faceless, and borderless community.
Peeling back a few layers off the Internet culture onion, we arrive at the Absurd: an umbrella containing absurdist, surreal, and deep-fried memes.
You’ve likely never heard of them, and that’s fine. That means you likely have a healthy brain and maybe even know what to do with it.
Absurdist, surreal, and deep-fried memes are riffs on mainstream and Internet culture, but with a twist that is, for some reason, reveled by clusters of people around the world. Rapidly growing subreddits such as r/DeepFriedMemes (nearly 800k subscribers) and r/SurrealMemes (nearly 600k subscribers seeking memes from a “future unreality”) are shining examples.
Chances are you know what a meme is, so let’s dive deeper. Let’s assume you’re a complete loser like this writer and have a more intimate understanding of memes–a pseudo Internet historian sorts.
You view yourself as an unappreciated and underpaid academic. You’ve seen it all. You woke up one day a nihilist and you treat your morning Instagram scroll like a subway commute to reach your homeostasis of Internet consumption. New trends and joke formats don’t phase you. Wendy’s rambunctious corporate Twitter account, hailed for its sassy responses, could start telling people to go fuck themselves for all you care–that’s so 2017!
But when you see something good, it’s good. You’re like the ruthless restaurant critic in Ratatouille reminded of his mother’s cooking and brought to tears by a confit byaldi.
People tend to have an intimate relationship with a particular meme or joke that tickles their fancy or at least registers a notch above an emotional zero. Hence, most popular memes gravitate around feelings we’ve all shared: brutal public humiliation, heart-rending emotional pain, drudging and seemingly sporadic depression–the stuff that makes life so much fun.
In this regard, niche meme humor and the emotions it conjures could technically be reverse-engineered to paint a picture of the psychology of a certain group or individual. We’re quick to disregard memes as anything but silly sinkholes for time, but there may be something deeper beneath the surface.
Might we someday look at an individual’s meme preferences in the same way we now look to a Myers-Briggs or Rorschach test? They must at least be more accurate in predicting human behavior than horoscopes (that’s such a Sagittarius thing to say, oh my god Alex!)
If we can glean insights about the human subconscious from scattered inkblots and vague personality questions, what value can we find in a neatly packaged meme?
Take a walk on the deep-fried side.
Exploring the deep-fried meme sausage factory is a questionable, but artful and investigative endeavor, kind of like analyzing how Van Gogh’s art changed after he gave his ear the snip-snip special. So pack your berets, we’re going in.
The above tweet by user @alaskancarl1 (Exhibit 1) is the genesis of a joke that briefly set the Internet on fire. @alaskancarl1’s anecdote is great tinder for virality because of its a “something for everybody” type of stories loaded imagery.
First, we observe someone else’s non-traditional movie theater snacking choice. Where most would play it safe with candy and popcorn, Carl, who may or may not be from the state of Alaska (details that flavor the story), chose baked beans– a respectable move for what it’s worth. Eating baked beans in a dark room rarely paints an optimistic picture, and this type of “laughing down” type of joke makes us feel like the elite. For a bunch of jabronis who find solace in a screen in-between sessions of life grinding us to meatballs with self-esteem issues, this joke presents a rare opportunity to feel on high ground. For a small moment, we’re free from our social fear and insecurity of having something so awful as spilling beans on ourselves in public.
The tweet also begs the question of logistics. How did Carl get the baked beans in there? Were they in a can? Tupperware? Did he bring a can opener? We don’t know. We are all complicit in the American pastime of rebelliously sneaking our own snacks into a movie theater, and are essentially enablers of Carl’s tragedy.
Third, Cars 2. You just thought of that red smirking shiny car. Everyone did. This also factors into the story. What precious childhood memory have we edged out to make room for Lightning McQueen?
Fourth, the added insult of being publically blasted, especially by someone younger, tugs on our deep-rooted fears of social humiliation that likely started in the horrors of grade school. You may have thought you’d escaped the cruelty of teenagers, Carl, but there are new ones, more creative ones, who will be ready to ambush you until the day you die.
Poor cat-avatared Carl experienced a situation that anyone from Barack Obama to Ted Bundy would have found humiliating. He took to the warm embrace of the Internet in self-deprecating admission. The Internet is always there to laugh at and with you. Carl is all of us, and we are Carl. The Internet is the closest we’ll come to true agape, the highest form of love, a charity, and kinship for all humankind.
If you’re curious why eating beans in a theater is funny, Reddit user Jazz_Fart explains:
The tweet from the now-suspended Twitter account AlaskanCarl1 was liked by over 28.3k users and quickly turned into a web sensation. Dozens of popular accounts on different platforms shared the joke and its many derivatives. Carl’s story would soon become mangled in the supply chain of joke distribution, with many people defiling it with personal touches, such as Exhibit 2.
This iteration of the joke features an over-saturated image of Spongebob Squarepants villain Plankton being visibly upset. The original joke itself was already nearing the end of its popularity life cycle and heading toward our subconscious wastebasket, likely pushing out some pertinent life skill to make space. Uncreative attempts such as Exhibit 2 were supposed to be the final nails in the coffin. But that’s when something peculiar happened.
Like an esoteric tribe of disfigured mystics collecting peculiar items for mysterious rituals, the deep-fried meme community harvested the joke cadaver.
Exhibit 3, or what I like to call, The Disaster Artist of memes, utilizes the scrap metal to create an artisanal beauty, much like an origami rose created from old prosthetic limbs.
This masterpiece is by any regard, a fuck-up of biblical proportions. But like the flying plastic bag in American Beauty, it is Art of a higher form. Every element of the image is in disrepair: the immediate butchering of the “beans” joke at the top, the trainwreck attempt at an acronym for ‘BEANS’ (a riff on another popular meme format), the grainy mirrored backdrop of a gentleman (rapper 21 Savage?) in a Bentley, and a default “TAP TO ADD A CAPTION” tag that comes from online meme generators, undoubtedly a snub at the meme rookies littering our social platforms. This creation is signed by its artist, a user called juicybignut.
A signature of deep-fried memes is a complete bastardization of current popular meme trends that would make the original creators weep like Don Corleone, “Look how they massacred my boy.” It’s like a Dinner for Shmucks for memes. Most deep-fried iterations aren’t constructive, but some are borderline profane in their mutilation.
The web’s strangest memes are born from a borderless decentralized community effort. In much the same way that blues musicians riff on each other’s playing, meme creators toy with variations on the same comical concept, each adding a unique element. These additions don’t seem to have any reaction in mind other than to flaunt absurdist depths.
With this in mind, it’s worth exploring what sense of community these riffs help foster? If we had to slap a single identity on the deep-fried community, what would it be?
A Portal Through Expressions
The internet is like the sun; everyone seems to need just the right amount to function in modern society, but too much of it will leave a grapefruit-sized tumor. Heavy internet use is a prerequisite to fully understand the many nuances of deep-fried memes, but cultivating a taste for them doesn’t happen so quickly. The world breaks people down, and the Internet gives them a swift kick to the kidneys for good measure.
Life can already be particularly heavy, and the Internet is a digital watering hole where everyone is either infinity more successful and better looking than you, or an absolute circus freak–the only in-between is you.
Many partially or completely broken people end up with a deep-fried meme type of humor, and as you can imagine, it’s probably a very strange path that gets one there. Before we explore why we feel a certain way, let’s think about how an external stimulus nudges us in a specific direction.
I’ve toyed around with the idea of three levels of creative expression, each with varying difficulties of execution.
Moskov’s Three Layers of Creative Communication
- Layer 1: What does it say? Pure information such as data and events. Think of news reporters. “Salvador Dali’s Portrait de Paul Eluard was sold by Sotheby’s in London for $22.4 Million in 2011.” By the end of this communication, you’ll understand a fact.
- Layer 2: What’s the idea? A higher-level concept that may or may not require an element of persuasion to convince of its superiority. Think of journalism with a degree of subjectivity that inches the reader towards a particular idea, such as utopian socialism or limitless gun rights. By the end of this communication, you’ll feel a certain way about an idea directly influenced by what you were just told.
- Layer 3: What should I feel? A feeling that resonates and can be identified to some degree. Think of a short poem solely about a red wagon that has thousands of readers weeping and thinking about their childhood. By the end of this communication, you’ll feel strong emotions that go beyond simply ideology.
As a creator, the third level is arguably the hardest to reach. Writers slave for days over a single story to attempt to nail down a feeling or emotion they want to channel. This is why 99.99% of poems suck, and why .01% will shake your being.
Memes, for all their silliness, blast the reader straight through the third layer (feeling) and are extraordinarily efficient information delivery vehicles. They engage us aesthetically, logically, and emotionally in ten seconds or less. Memes have a powerful one-two punch: a written context and a visual accentuation of the meaning, all of which we can consume at our pace. We don’t need the entire movie to understand the scene, we can make do with a seven-word sentence and a single character (usually someone from our childhood like Spongebob, Shrek, Kermit the Frog, etc., or a cat) expressing an emotion.
Once you’ve become accustomed to the delivery format of memes, they’re basically quick puzzles for the brain that offer a good laugh and sense of community as a reward.
It’s no shocker memes have become so popular with the onset of modern social media. Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms are so delicately engineered to keep us on the platform, engorging us with quick hits of what we want. For a post-Internet generation tamed by social algorithms and addicted to instant gratification, it’s no shocker we gravitate towards one of the quickest information delivery vehicles since the dawn of intelligent thought: memes.
Culture Evolving at the Speed of the Internet
The anonymity or pseudonymity of the Internet allows for the introverted class clown to reign king, an individual otherwise limited in the real world by a lack of charismatic verbal storytelling, social anxiety, or some other hindrance. Some ideas may also be too complex to express in a limited conversational window. For example, how can you explain the deep-fried BEAANS meme to a stranger without sounding absolutely insane? You can’t, you have to write a 3,000+ word essay to just scratch the surface.
Internet culture will always evolve, and its more recent developments of absurdist, surreal, and deep-fried memes are essentially the web’s psych ward, where there are no caretakers and the drooling patients run amok scribbling obscenities on the walls.
At an initial glance, this mutation of the evolutionary chain of Internet culture appears to have little purpose, like a cat with thumbs. However, the Internet enables the release and consumption of preposterous humor at an unprecedented scale, which means we have the power to aggregate data points en masse.
Friends I sent deep-fried memes to had reactions that ran the gamut of mild confusion (“wat”) to what I can only interpret as hysteria (“ahhahahhaha”), with the middle range being tepid acceptance, which I discount as a politeness to a friend who seems to be mentally imploding.
However, the hardcore deep-fried-aficionados were all somewhat chaotic individuals and remarkably similar characteristics:
- Adult children of divorce
- Repeatedly in toxic relationships
- Frequent city hoppers
- Careers on the fringe of the mainstream (entrepreneurs, writers, artists, adult film performers, and teachers)
- Excel in one type of intelligence (logical, emotional, existential, linguistic, etc.,) be next-to-hopeless in the others.
It’s not a stretch to assume different types of people cultivate particular types of meme affinity. The more niche the category (deep-fried), the clearer the picture of cumulative qualities for each demographic. Could memes actually be golden behavioral psychology nuggets? What role do they play, if any, in understanding a generation with one foot in the post-Internet world and one rooted in pre-Internet traditions? How about for generations that take to the iPhones and tablets a few years after the womb?
Dada and Da-da-deep Fried Memes
There are stark comparisons between the deep-fried meme culture of today and Dadaism in the early 20th century. Dadaism was a popular absurdist Avante-Garde modern art movement that started around 1916 and was rebellious against the art of its time. Similarly, absurdist, surreal, and deep-fried memes are a rebellion against mainstream meme culture today. Dadaism was born out of general disillusionment with what creative society had to offer, as well as the tragic backdrop of people being blown to bits in World War I trenches.
In this same vein, the post-Internet generation (mostly Millennials and Generation Z) also contains an element of disenchantment, with what though is not as cut and dry.
We don’t have a recent global war to derive our cynicism from, but we do have one rapid fundamental societal shift to process. Millennials, in particular, experienced childhood at a slower pace with corded landline phones and scheduled TV programming. Now, things are different. We’re enamored with our smartphones, likes give us precious hits of dopamine we keep coming back for, and we have hundreds to thousands of poorly maintained social connections with other people, many of which we’ve never even met.
Dadaism heavily leaned on the “life is meaningless” doctrine as the horrors of war tend to conjure. Prior to Dadaism, the previous forms of modern art and creative expression seemed to hit their saturation point, with most artists producing marginal iterations on something that has been done before. The absurdists channeled their frustrations through their own satirical and cynical renditions, such as French artist Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was simply an upside-down urinal.
Similarly, and in a much more effortless manner, deep-fried memes channel a rejection of mainstream meme and social media culture by bastardizing popular meme trends, such as artist juicybignut’s BEANNS.
Creative movements are like waves, and disillusionment is a fairly good signal of one wave’s receding to be replaced by another. Disillusionment brought us dadaism, surrealism, punk rock, grunge rock, and deep-fried memes. If surrealist and deep-fried memes are yet another proliferation of the “life is meaningless” doctrine, what more can we learn about the human attraction to nihilism and meaninglessness at the global scale the Internet provides?
Diving into Existential Depths for Catharsis
“The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.”
- Rene Magritte
The logical human brain constantly seeks out patterns and problems for everything from finding our next meal to making meaning of our existence. Wildly unreasonable ideas and situations tickle us. Naturally, being locked in a fleshy skin bag on a gigantic, dangerous mound of dirt and water flying around in an incomprehensibly large (“infinite”) and chaotic, mysterious nothingness leaves the mind with some questions.
Some metaphysical masochists have embraced “the Absurd”, receiving something near joy from the excruciating difficulty of finding any inherent meaning in life.
Philosophically, the Absurd is the result of the friction between finite humans with consciousness and an infinite universe existing congruously. Absurdism pokes fun at existentialism and the irrational, nonsensical components of life that make it so frustratingly difficult to understand.
What if absurdist memes are actually just a knee-jerk reaction to the mass disillusion of Internet culture? It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume the mass consumption of content, most of it being a vanity highlight reel, has some negative psychological implications.
Or, perhaps, do these niche memes provide an outlet for emotions and feelings that were otherwise incredibly difficult to express.
Absurdist memes are a movement to question the significance of mainstream humor, and they utilize the simple, highly efficient frameworks of memes as information transmission vehicles and social platforms as distribution channels.
Absurdism takes the big Why and occasionally cleaves it through human constructs such as art, music, memes, etc., to remind us “hey, why the fuuuck are we Here?” It’s a departure from creating art for the sake of creativity, and focuses on creating art for the sake of understanding our own creation.
Are absurdist memes a human behavioral dead-end, or a puzzle piece of human psychology we have yet to find a fit for? At scale, there must be some golden braid that connects people with specific types of meme humor.
Then again, are these memes simply just therapeutic? Even a simple digital high five for a weird sense of humor goes a long way to foster community among a generation spending a bulk of their day interacting on Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and Facebook.
Or perhaps, are deep-fried memes poking a deep-rooted existential cerebral glitch? Are they just fantasies of insanity? Warped masturbations of being a genius that understands a higher type of art? In a time where serial killer docuseries are some of the most popular content on Netflix, why not.
Only time will tell what insights about the human brain we can learn from absurdist memes and niche Internet humor. Until then, be careful where you eat your beans.
Many thanks to Tim Kreider for helping edit and nudge ideas in a better direction. Check out his stuff, it rocks.
