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Something happened to “meme culture” in 2024. Sure, the genre of media had never landed a highbrow respect, but last year it felt like it was pushed down a peg. As Gen Z gazed queasily upon a world of increasing chaos and instability, we looked to a new generation that was soon to inherit the meme tradition we’d spent nearly a decade redefining, and clearly, we did not love what we saw. Perhaps in reaction to a genre that seems to reward the senseless repetition of the most absurd, irreverent, or stupid, we shuffled around a new term in reference to nearly anything associated with a meme: “brainrot.” The phrase is a condemnation, an admission of shame. It started out by applying to only a few of the most seemingly stupid or meaningless memes, but slowly, I noticed it creep into conversation around any inside joke, shared image, or public figure on the internet. It all started when they shot the gorilla, cynics say, branding the genre with the blunt, self-evident decisiveness of a bullet. To me, it felt like it all started with the warmer and more representationally fixed We Are Number One meme, a drawn-out joke that only really worked if you were scared by the show Lazy Town as a kid. Like so many later memes, this one drew upon something within many of us – something tough to explain but something we knew or had known – something decidedly complex.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I agree that meme humor is a race to the bottom in many ways. Sometimes, the dumbest, most meaningless, and most asinine things are simply the very funniest and gain the most traction. But this does not necessarily mean that all memes are simple. If they were, then wouldn’t everyone laugh at them? Your father won’t laugh at a dank meme; he’ll shake his head and wish you had a war to fight in. A Stuart England Child? The Prime Minister of Uruguay? Not a chance. Memes, especially the kind that are contemporary and seemingly random, are usually dependent on a certain consciousness at a certain time to receive their meaning. They are but half of a thing. Their message is conveyed through the cultured understandings of the viewer, and plays off a wide corpus of collective understandings each time, whether they are tied to social norms, cultural references, or basic knowledge. It’s just so obvious that we can’t help not to think about it that way. In more snooty terms, they are inventions of postmodernism.
Let me explain. Take the state of Ohio, one of the key terms in the brain rot glossary. Sure, Ohio is a funny state. But there is something that makes Ohio funny, something you have to know. Maybe it’s the perception that Ohio is a boring, unsexy Midwest state, which, when invoked in ridiculous, random scenarios, creates a playful contrast. Maybe it’s the fact that the ever memeable Paul brothers and JD Vance are notably from Ohio. Maybe it’s the Harry Potter hates Ohio t-shirt. Any or all of these ideas are subconsciously floating around when you or anyone invokes the Buckeye state. It simply is not that funny of a word in and of itself. The cultural juice is doing most of the talking. Or how about the meme of Jaden Smith’s “political and economic state of the world” riff, which has gained a second life of sorts in reaction to host Kurt “Big Boy” Alexander’s rather overzealous attempt to play off of Smith’s “young person” impression by shouting “BROOO.” Sure, Big Boy’s delivery is funny, and yes, part of the humor comes from your active perceptions of both men, particularly Jaden and his father. But there’s even more going on in this one. The humor of it seems to be playing off a sort of fatigue among the o online population with men broadcasting their self-importance by advertising their intellectual engagement with complex and serious topics. The models of this archetype range from Joe Rogan to your once-silly-now-serious-now-drunk-cousin. It is the projection of the cultural template, now played out in a silly, overprotruded manner, that creates the humor. A similar template can be applied on Luke Belmar’s “Johnnie Walker” meme, or the “I bought a property in Egypt” guy, two opportunities to lambast the sanctimonious ridiculousness of hustle culture and the manosphere, categories fraught with a web of existing cultural perceptions.
None of this rich culturality is new either. How about 2018’s “E” meme, which contained a grotesque combination of Mark Zuckerberg, Markiplier, and Lord Farquad. The meme gets funnier with each overlapping layer of context you can place on these three figures, and yes, there is plenty. The 2014-15 MLG era was rife with cultural backdrop. Illuminati Confirmed? You mean the 18th-century secret society founded by the Electorate of Bavaria? Mt. Dew and Doritos? Tell me how that is funny without a breadth of existing knowledge.
A few days ago, I saw a meme of Howie Mandel telling a child on Canada’s Got Talent that he is the “youngest person ever.” Then the screen abruptly cut to an image of a cellphone indicating that “freak-bob,” (presumably a freaky version of Spongebob) is calling, paired with a soundbite of a child yelling, “It’s a floater” and another young voice addressing the name “Adrian.” Then we immediately cut to Big-Boy’s “Brooo” and then the rapper XXXTentacion asking what a father is. A widened image of Dwayne Johnson’s face appeared with a deep “BOOM” sound, followed by the intonation of an old Nokia ringtone. The whole thing relied on more cultural capital than your average feature film. Even I was lost. I still laughed.
Now stop me if I’m giving too much credit to the modern meme enjoyer. Sure, it’s impossible to say for certain that when a fifteen-year-old kid laughs at the “hawk tuah” girl, they are finding amusement in the level of social fame and attention given to a phrase so tawdry and irreverent, as most of us really are, rather than in the joke itself. But given the astounding amount of psychic data floating around and between us at all times in 2025 – opinions, ideas, media, – , it is inevitable that anyone and everyone will eventually apply this bounty of cultural feedback to the memes that are so rife with it. Young people (especially, but not only those in the same country) have more in common with each other than at any time in the history of the world. They just might not realize it. I find that culture often happens behind our backs and under our thumbed noses, and memes are irreversibly drenched and soaked in it.
