Coronavirus II: Revenge Of The Boredom Meme

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the September 2020 issue of Meme Insider, a magazine covering memes and other internet phenomena. You can subscribe here.

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Imagine, for a moment, some sort of strange extraterrestrial phenomenon causes electricity to stop across the entire world. There’s still food and water, but all common forms of entertainment vanish. Sony, Nintendo and all game studios stop making video games. There's no television, no ability to listen to music. Starved for distraction, the global population gets really into ball-in-a-cup. In itself, the ball-in-a-cup toy is not all that fun, but as everyone in the world has nothing else to do, ball-in-a-cup becomes a global phenomenon.

Those who remember video games realize that this kind of sucks, but it’s all there is. So, we grin and bear it until someone figures out how to turn the power back on, and we can all get back to what we’re used to. This has been the meme economy during the coronavirus pandemic.

For those plugged into the meme scene, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic meant that the current meme landscape was about to drastically change. Massive global events are always fodder for memes, and with COVID-19, memers faced what will (hopefully) be the biggest global event of their lives. March and April were filled with corona-related memes: jokes about the sudden dearth of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, the onslaught of “very” serious, “in these unprecedented times” television commercials, anime-waifu drawings of the coronavirus, etc. All of this was pretty par for the course for the meme economy, which is used to firing out jokes on the big story du jour until the story ends.

But the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t end. Gatherings still aren’t safe. The live-entertainment industry remains on pause. Movies have barely come out. Sports came back to empty arenas, making broadcasts a chilling reminder of how quiet life has become. It’s been six months, and still, nothing is happening.

The meme economy, of course, isn’t equipped to handle months of one thing, and eventually, jokes about the coronavirus stopped being in vogue. The meme economy had to move on with very few pop culture events to meme on, which it frankly isn’t very well-equipped to do. The economy needs content to feed on, and starved of that, internet users have turned to meme trends of ye olden days, the “ball-in-a-cup” memes of ancient times: Boredom Memes.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, viral memes looked much different than they do today. Facebook users at the time may remember what it was like: every week, there was a new silly challenge, things like Bra Status Updates, 25 Things About Me, Cartoon Profile Picture Challenges, etc. These weren’t so much memes-as-jokes so much as they were vanity projects to prove you were online and plugged into what everyone else was doing online: in short, they were things to do when you were bored. They weren’t clever and were rarely interesting, but they passed the time well enough when you’re a teenager with nothing to do after homework. The development of the internet has mostly made these things passé, as the generation that grew up doing these sorts of things has moved on to more sophisticated joke templates, but with nothing to do – and nothing to meme – internet users have returned to the scourge of internet 2.0, the Boredom Memes.

In recent months, several templates spread on social media which echoed the vanity boredom memes of the past. Arguably, the most egregious of these was "What X Are You" Instagram posts, which would simply put your name in bright colors in front of an image of whatever “X” was, whether that be an animal, a scene from Friends or Guy Fieri, with no connection to whatever your name is. As a meme, it was an exhausting clog on Instagram stories, a piece of nothing content that didn’t even offer the viewer the chance to see the poster’s reaction, unlike the similar "Which Disney Character Are You?" filter craze from several months prior.

There was also the confusing “Challenge Accepted” Black and White Selfie challenge from July, in which women posted black-and-white selfies under the guise of empowering other women. The trend started as a political statement: women in Turkey launched the challenge as a way to combat black-and-white press photographs of women who had been killed. This was almost completely lost upon English-speaking audiences, many of which used the opportunity to post a cute picture of themselves, recalling some of the most blatant slacktivist trends of Facebook’s heyday, like Bra Status Updates and profile pictures with French-flag filters.

In the case of both “What X Are You” and “Challenge Accepted,” the content was relatively harmless, but a reminder of just how barren popular culture has become in the time of coronavirus. With nothing to do, bored Instagram users indulged in vanity, which wasn’t necessarily interesting, but at least it wasn’t egregiously unfunny -- that was reserved for Twitter.

On Twitter, corona-boredom gave rise to two miserable wordplay memes: I Have A Joke and ‘My nouns? Adjective!’ Title Parodies. The former template, despite the promise of a joke, was hardly a joke at all. In variations, people would say “I have a joke about X profession” and then the punchline would be loosely related to the profession. In theory, it could be a strong setup, but in practice, it turned into a way to subtly virtue signal and humblebrag. For example, one tweet that read, “I have a joke about a man but he’s already explaining it to me,” gained over 4,300 likes. Another read, “I have a joke about ‘Counterstrike’ but mobile gamers wouldn’t get it.” The template in itself is fine, but it grew into a brief sensation and led to an exhausting week where seemingly the entire site was trying – and mostly failing – to wring humor out of it.

More perplexing were the title parodies which, as a template, isn’t a joke at all, yet it grew inexplicably popular. The entire premise was putting the words of famous titles in different orders. Popular examples included “My Heights? Wuthering!” and “My Gatsby? Great!” Again, as one tweet, the template is a little silly and fun, but its astounding spread made it instantly trite. It was a meme so simple that everyone could do it, yet so inherently unclever, it was impossible to build on.

Both templates recall the Boredom Memes of early Facebook. The templates each have a low ceiling of humor, and they’re hardly interesting memes, but crucially, they’re “something to do.” The vacuum of content left by the coronavirus means people who would otherwise be posting about the NBA Finals or the new Mulan movie are instead using their posting economy on whatever thing seems to be spreading online, creating a momentary boost in weak memes.

This isn’t to say all memes during the pandemic have been bad. Always Has Been became an unstoppable force through June and July, Are Ya Winning Son? came back with a strange and surreal twist, and early August saw the rise of Yakuza’s incredible ballad “Dame Da Ne” transform into one of the best meme songs of the year. However, these aberrations are also a byproduct of the pandemic. All of these were pre-existing memes revived during the pandemic and dragged out to their weirdest ends as people countered the lack of new memes by revisiting old ones, like a music fan going through an artist’s old material after they outplay their favorite album.

As a meme economy model, meme revival unsustainable, but it can last for a while. There are, of course, lots of memes that had potential but didn’t get their due in the “Before Times.” But the lack of quality new memes is a troubling trend as the world stares down many more months of the pandemic. Obviously, people need a vaccine for myriad reasons, such as stemming the incredible tidal wave of death wrought by COVID-19 and the economic collapse of the entire world, but it would also be nice if “things” could happen again so people can stop making bad jokes online.