Goots And The Art Of Memeing For Meme’s Sake

Don’t you miss the days when memes didn’t use to mean anything? The internet was a mere distraction, people still got most of their jokes from somewhere other than social media and you could make a funny image macro without it being too angry or horny, or making some kind of socio-political point that combines the two.

Things may seem to have become a lot more serious over the years, but there are still parts of meme culture that keep this irreverence alive. Memeing for purely humorous purposes is alive and well. Its most recent viral example has been Goots, who rests on the laurels of being a fat bird with a funny name. Simple and effective, and it comes from a genre of meme committed to making a figurehead that goes back to basics and avoids the polemics.

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In theory, most image-based memes have the same tools to work with. There are only so many popular variations on "picture-with-text" after all. The difference with your average decontextualized meme is that it seems to appear like something out of the blue. They follow a nonsensical logic that appears to have come to the meme creator in a dream, tied to a personable main character to give it that relatable edge. This is perfectly exemplified in something like Dat Boi, whose strangely appealing frog and unicycle combination won hearts for exactly that reason. Goots follows in these footsteps in a subtler way, with its eponymous bird gaining its charm from its completely out-of-place proportions.

Due to their unexpected composition, it’s unusual that these kinds of memes take much inspiration from popular culture. When they do, it’s almost always distorted in some way, as shown in one of the (literal) giants of the genre, Big Chungus.

One of those "once every few years" memes that is as much a movement as a format, it was set apart by its apparent purposelessness. Its use of an obscure Bugs Bunny frame was taken to icon status with its shitpost-adjacent name — almost, but not quite an identifiable word. As a new piece of vocabulary, it was allowed to take on a life of its own, with the character even finding its way into the Warner Bros. canon through last year’s Looney Tunes: World Of Mayhem. It’s a miniature world-building concept that has been replicated countless times since, although not to this scale.

For many of these memes, this confusing form they take can be explained by a feeling of artificiality. It’s notable that while most of this genre of memes is definitively man-made, there’s a sense that they have been computer-generated in some way. In the case of Goots, whose popularity this year stemmed from a post that suggested that it was thought up by an algorithm, there’s a deliberate invoking of the uncanny.

It harks back to some of the earliest known forms of the modern meme, the Dancing Baby. Originating as a software product sample and then graduating to one of the most memorable chain emails of the '90s, it proved a vital trailblazer in the context-free, random stance taken on board by many memes going forward.

This is an attitude taken on board by Goots, albeit in a vastly different online landscape. The way in which it uses a LOLcat-worthy misspelling seems to ask us to cast aside any preconceived notions of unacceptable cringe, partly due to its wholesome associations and partly thanks to the fact that it has some direct predecessors.

Honse and BODE, which gained much of their popularity on Tumblr, essentially represent the horse and cat versions of the Goots spirit. Their misshapen figures and slang misspellings take an almost identical form to the latest in the line. Much like the phenomenon of Big Chungus, their sheer size commands an almost messianic presence that overshadows the need for further posturing.

There’s a free-spirited attitude to this type of meme, achieved through a well-trodden formula. It involves a sense of being deep enough into the internet that irreversible damage has been done, but at the same time, it allows for a welcome innocence that brings purity to the content that it creates. This allows them to act as a blank canvas of sorts, with which to interact with other concepts (so long as things don't get too complicated).

This can be most clearly seen in more multidimensional types of these kinds of memes, such as Meme Man. While it works with the same eerie aesthetics and irreverent attitude seen elsewhere, its frequent accompaniment to dumb and troll logic-adjacent decisions takes it the extra mile. The stonks go up with every nonsensical move, and there are plenty of examples that are more than willing to contribute.

The pace of the internet content mill is unrelenting. Every meme, whether it’s topical or just plain stupid, quickly gets complicated to a point of no return when it reaches peak virality. This type of pure meme seems to get this process out the way before it even graces our screens, offering an evergreen counterpoint to the churn. Goots is the latest in a line of palate cleansers. Sometimes it pays to just be funny, without trying to be smart.

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