Memes In The Time Of The Coronavirus

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

COVID-19, the infectious disease caused by a variation of SARS called SARS-CoV2 that’s known colloquially as the coronavirus, has quite literally taken over the world. Since first being documented in Wuhan, China, the virus has infected populations in most countries of the world, leading to extreme social distancing measures, including quarantines, event cancellations, and restaurant closings. The global pandemic, which has a high mortality rate of 3.4 percent overall and a staggering 15 percent for people over 80 years old, has the planet afraid to go outside. It’s also led to one of the biggest onslaughts of memes the world has ever seen. Go figure.

This year has been a difficult one for American memers, with January bringing escalating military tensions between Iran and the U.S., February bringing a shady bungling of democracy itself in the Iowa caucus, and the full-on coronavirus pandemic hitting the country in March. The ceaseless storm of bad news has hardly given memers time to breathe, and the meme economy has been inadvertently forced to spend its time coming up with new ways to make light of the latest bad situation. Still, the internet soldiers on. During this chaotic and scary time in history, its people need memes, particularly now more than ever.

Humor is a fascinating -- and effective -- coping mechanism in the face of tragedy, as has been documented for decades. In his academic articles “A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes” and “Making a Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in Constructing a Global Response to Disaster,” Pennsylvania State University’s folklore studies scholar Bill Ellis noted that post-tragedy humor has been a staple of culture since at least the JFK assassination. It is also a media-driven phenomenon. Ellis’ papers both cover the role of humor in the response to 9/11, positing that when presented with shocking and terrible images (such as the Twin Towers falling) Americans turned toward humor to regain some sense of normalcy, as if brushing the horror away with a glib or shocking joke. Ellis wrote, “A wave of humor signals Americans' desire to resolve the key dissonances in the media coverage of disasters, gain control over them, and so reach closure in their grieving process.”

In 2020, the “wave of humor” Ellis described has taken the form of memes. Faced with a brutal and confusing time in history, the denizens of the internet -- young, tech-savvy millennials and zoomers with a talent for Photoshop -- have been doing what they do best: posting. In January, a wave of World War III memes flooded the internet, as memers braced to keep the possibility of global military conflict at bay with gallows humor image macros. Nowadays, as people hunker down with naught but their internet connection and some video games, it seems as though every post online is somehow coronavirus related.

In an effort to mitigate the damage of the virus, many people have, voluntarily or by mandate, essentially locked themselves indoors, leading to a flurry of wickedly creative posts showcasing what humans can achieve when faced with wild boredom. An astounding number of coronavirus memes, hashtags, and video trends hit the internet in the weeks following the virus reaching American shores. There have been videos of people creating insane home “sports,” such as “Roomba Curling” and “Pet Tic Tac Toe.” People made bangers remixing Cardi B simply saying “coronavirus.” An anime interpretation (or gijinka) of the virus called Corona-chan has been spreading through anime-based subreddits flirting with users. People have made sexy fan art of toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

Is any of this helpful? Obviously drawing Corona-chan is not going to save lives, but coronavirus memes demonstrate the bizarrely inspiring forms human resiliency takes in the face of crisis. Writing for Motherboard about the “waifu-ification” of COVID-19, Samantha Cole said, “Turning a virus that's killed nearly 8,000 people, especially in China and Japan, into a cute anime girl is insensitive to that reality … but it's also a way people have chosen to cope using gallows humor and a horny anime drawing. Maybe people need that right now.”

Indeed, the humor behind a coronavirus meme is undoubtedly dark, but what is a simple anime artist, high school Redditor or millennial forced to telecommute to work to do? The average person is powerless to stop problems of a global magnitude; what they can do is attempt to raise the spirits of their fellow man, both for humanity’s sake and their own.

In her article, Cole spoke to an artist who drew what is quickly becoming an infamous coronavirus meme: a very obviously male personification of hand sanitizer seductively posed and clearly ready to have sex. The artist, known as Iggi, had perhaps one of the wisest takes on memes in the time of coronavirus: “I personally feel like it is important to spread humor and fun things as a way for us to collectively cope … In a time of crisis like this is where many of us artists can shine and brighten other people's days."

While a horny drawing of hand sanitizer may not be the thing to brighten everyone’s day, Iggi’s sentiment rings true. It speaks to the mildly perverse beauty in memeing the coronavirus. In a time of great fear, internet jokesters have taken on a vital role in society of providing fleeting emotional relief. Unlike the gaggle of spring breakers who went viral for partying hard in close quarters during the pandemic, internet memers are not coping with the coronavirus by pretending it doesn’t exist, but rather by recontextualizing it as an event that can in fact produce humor alongside anxiety and uncertainty. Their contribution to the world during the pandemic, however small, underlines one of the great axioms of the modern internet: Just post through it, and, eventually, it will go away.