Meme Commentary

The two memes I have chosen for this assignment are the ‘Sue Sylvester “I am going to create an environment that is so toxic”’ meme and the ‘DW holding on to the fence’ memes. The Sue Sylvester meme is one of my favorites because of its versatility. People can pick any letters they want out of the original sentence, ‘I am going to create an environment that is so toxic’ and use them to create an entirely new sentence. The meme also includes a variation in which people replace certain words in the sentence with a new set of words entirely, an example of “reproduction by various forms of imitation” (Shifman 372). I like how the meme looks so homemade and this adds to its adaptability. I like the DW meme because it is a very relatable meme, especially during the pandemic. I would see this meme paired with pictures of restaurants, concerts, or other countries lifting lockdown restrictions. DW’s straight face also perfectly conveys the emotion of these events.

The framework of Sue is as follows. The content is creating certain environment or object within a given situation. The form is a closeup of a person seated at her desk wearing a pink tracksuit and sneering. The stance is ironic keying and poetic communicative functions.

The framework of Dw is as follows. The content of the meme is feeling left out and jealous. The form is one person standing with their hand against the fence, facing the object of their desire. The stance is ironic keying, metalingual communicative functions.

I would classify these as situational memes, which occur as a direct response to an outside stimulus. What identifies the memes to this category is their versatility, you can pair them with any context and their extreme elasticity means you can manipulate them to fit the situation you have created. Also everyone can use them because of the fact mentioned above which is that they are extremely versatile. Even can be extremely niche to a subset of people, like an inside joke or something that happened specifically at your school. Shifman describes how “The meme has no existence outside the events, practices, and texts in which it appears” and this directly applies to these two memes because they would be incoherent without context (367). As discussed above, both memes are also very versatile, increasing their “degree of fitness, that is, their level of adaptiveness to the sociocultural environment in which they propagate” (Shifman 365). While both memes are used to indicate a negative emotion about a situation, they are quite different because Sue is a text-based meme while DW is just the image. Sue is also typically altered in some way but DW rarely is.

Sue had a large popularity during fall of 2020 and was impossible to escape during that time for about a month, but I haven’t seen the meme since then. The sweet spot for meme virality is when “it's started to spread wildly, yet few have hijacked it”- once past this point, the meme can become cliché and dead. On the other hand, DW has been around for a while and every few months I see it pop up again. In my opinion, social media was never as oversaturated with DW as it was with Sue, but this means it is a more sustainable meme format. It seems to pop up again when situations call for it, and everyone recognizes it, but it's not overused enough for people to get sick of it like with Sue.

Click here to check out my take on these memes!