About

Why Is Millennial Humor So Weird? refers to a series of photoshops made combining a Washington Post article titled "Why Is Millennial Humor So Weird?" with surreal memes, deep fried memes, and other examples of ironic memes.

Origin

On August 11th, 2017, the Washington Post published an article by Elizabeth Bruenig titled "Why Is Millennial Humor So Weird?"^[1] In the piece, Bruenig documents some bizarre and ironic memes of the modern era such as the Snapchat Hot Dog Filter, Tim and Eric sketches, Harambe, and others while investigating what about modern culture draws millennials to this type of humor. Bruenig also interviews KnowYourMeme editor Adam Downer, who points to Hey Beter as an example of a bizarre modern meme. Photoshopped edits that paired the article's headline with images would feature similarly surreal and ironic memes. One of the earliest edits paired the headline with a surreal meme featuring Meme Man was posted to Funnyjunk on August 15th, 2017.^[2]

Spread

In the following weeks, other photoshops began appearing elsewhere on the internet. On August 16th, 2017, a photoshop posted to /r/deepfriedmemes gained over 1,400 points^[3] (shown below, left). On August 24th, a photoshop posted to /r/dankmemes^[4] gained 186 points (shown below, right).

The photoshops continued to see spread throughout 2017 and into 2018. The format began seeing further spread in April of 2018 after posts to /r/MemeEconomy. On April 23rd, a deep fried image paired with the headline posted to /r/MemeEconomy gained over 630 points (shown below, left). This led to a post on /r/dankmemes using a deep fried image of Markiplier on the body of Lord Farquad from Shrek, gaining over 22,000 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References