Futurama “Fry” Meme and why it is still going strong

By: Sean McChesney

It has been a meme that has been around for years, but despite it’s age, it still makes visitors to the internet crack up and relate. The “Fry” Futurama meme has been around since February of 2011 and many of the memes are meant to ask two questions at once. The meme is also meant to be very sarcastic and is mainly used to poke fun at others expense. For example, in the meme above, you see the question, “Not sure if too genius to understand, or just doesn’t make sense?” There are other versions of the memes and the meme continutes to relate to current events today. For example, there are memes that pose the questions, “Not sure if friends are dead, or playing skyrim?” “Not sure if I am listening to dubstep, or Charlie Brown’s Teacher is very pissed?” etc.

Now, in order to understand the meme, we must understand why it works. The meme works, because the target audience changes. As mentioned before, there are various versions of this meme and the meme relates to current events that are going on in the world. There are memes about sports, politics, trends, television shows, and more. So the meme is beneficial to any audience, because the meme is consistently changing to target different audiences, pending on who is looking to benefit from it. With that being said, in terms of vitality, how it went viral and why it is still going viral, this meme shows a bottom up effect. The reason we see a lot of bottom up effect in these memes, is like many comical memes on the internet, they are made up by average people with creative perspectives about current situations in the world. This effect would also make the people the gatekeepers of the meme, as they are the ones in charge of the creativity as well as the format of the meme and it’s fate when it comes to virality.

While we see a bottom up effect, we also see a top down effect with this meme. The Top down part of the effect comes from the hit TV show “Futurama.” The show gave the people the motivation to not only create the meme, but keep its legacy going. If it was not for the show, the people would not have even had the chance to create the meme.

In conclusion, the “Fry” Futurama meme may be older then the memes we are used to seeing on social media, but the meme still has traction and it is gaining traction as we speak. The meme deals with current events in our world today, it relates to generations old and new and it has stood its ground for the past six years without the slightest chance of the meme going extinint.