{"id":430,"date":"2020-11-14T21:28:49","date_gmt":"2020-11-14T21:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/?page_id=430"},"modified":"2020-11-15T20:07:44","modified_gmt":"2020-11-15T20:07:44","slug":"election-memes-2020-or-how-to-be-funny-when-nothing-is-fun","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/election-memes-2020-or-how-to-be-funny-when-nothing-is-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Election memes 2020, or, how to be funny when nothing is fun"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-is-layout-9d6595d7 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\" style=\"flex-basis:25%\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"453\" height=\"453\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-MilnerPhoto.png?resize=453%2C453&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-431\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-MilnerPhoto.png?w=453&amp;ssl=1 453w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-MilnerPhoto.png?resize=300%2C300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-MilnerPhoto.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-MilnerPhoto.png?resize=60%2C60&amp;ssl=1 60w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 453px) 100vw, 453px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"US206bio\"><strong>Dr Ryan M. Milner<\/strong><br><br>Associate Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston. He studies how online interaction matters socially, politically, and culturally. He is the author and co-author of three books: The World Made Meme, The Ambivalent Internet, and You Are Here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"453\" height=\"453\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-PhillipsPhoto.png?resize=453%2C453&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-432\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-PhillipsPhoto.png?w=453&amp;ssl=1 453w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-PhillipsPhoto.png?resize=300%2C300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-PhillipsPhoto.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/Ryan_Milner_-_MILNER-PhillipsPhoto.png?resize=60%2C60&amp;ssl=1 60w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 453px) 100vw, 453px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"US206bio\"><strong>Dr Whitney Phillips<\/strong><br><br>Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. She\u2019s the author of three books, most recently You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape, co-authored with Ryan Milner of the College of Charleston.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"400\" height=\"308\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/US20_divider_6_popular_culture.png?resize=400%2C308&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-191\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/US20_divider_6_popular_culture.png?w=400&amp;ssl=1 400w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/US20_divider_6_popular_culture.png?resize=300%2C231&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n<h5 class=\"US206\"> Section 6: Popular culture and public critique<\/h5>\n<div class=\"page-list\"><ul class=\"list-group-item\"><li class=\"page_item page-item-399\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/on-campaigns-and-political-trash-talk\/\">On campaigns and political trash talk<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"page_item page-item-402\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/its-all-about-my-team-what-we-can-learn-about-politics-from-sport\/\">It\u2019s all about my \u201cteam\u201d: what we can learn about politics from sport<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"page_item page-item-406\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/kelly-loeffler-uses-battle-with-the-wnba-as-springboard-into-georgia-senate-runoff\/\">Kelly Loeffler uses battle with the WNBA as springboard into Georgia Senate runoff<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"page_item page-item-409\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/made-for-the-fight-wnba-players-used-their-platform-for-anti-racism-activism-in-2020\/\">Made for the fight, WNBA players used their platform for anti-racism activism in 2020<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"page_item page-item-412\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/do-national-basketball-association-nba-teams-really-support-black-lives-matter\/\">Do National Basketball Association (NBA) teams really support Black Lives Matter?<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"page_item page-item-415\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/the-presidential-debates-the-media-frames-it-all-wrong\/\">The presidential debates: the media frames it all wrong<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"page_item page-item-418\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/live-from-california-its-kamala-harris\/\">Live&#8230; from California, it\u2019s Kamala Harris<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"page_item page-item-421\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/who-needs-anger-management-dismissing-young-engagement\/\">Who needs anger management? Dismissing young engagement<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"page_item page-item-424\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/meme-war-is-merely-the-continuation-of-politics-by-other-means\/\">Meme war is merely the continuation of politics by other means<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"page_item page-item-427\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/satire-failed-to-pack-a-punch-in-the-2020-election\/\">Satire failed to pack a punch in the 2020 election<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\" style=\"flex-basis:75%\">\n<p>During the 2020 Vice Presidential Debate, a fly landed on Mike Pence\u2019s head and Twitter went wild. It felt like old times; like 2012, when Mitt Romney\u2019s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/memes\/binders-full-of-women\">binders full of women<\/a>&nbsp;and Barack Obama\u2019s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-usa-campaign-horses\/horses-and-bayonets-becomes-latest-debate-catchphrase-idUSBRE89M08F20121023\">burn about bayonets<\/a>&nbsp;heralded a verifiable&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theawl.com\/2012\/11\/the-meme-election-clicktivism-the-buzzfeed-effect-and-corporate-meme-jacking\/\">meme election<\/a>. Or 2016, when&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/memes\/ken-bone\">Ken Bone<\/a>&nbsp;captivated the crowds and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.eonline.com\/photos\/15702\/the-5-blobfish-on-the-internet-that-happen-to-look-just-like-ted-cruz\">blobfish Ted Cruz<\/a>&nbsp;kept the good times rolling through an election cycle that was supposed to be a laffer. That fly landed, Mike Pence let it just&nbsp;<em>sit&nbsp;<\/em>there, and all the old fun cascaded out.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/mikepencefly___\">Pop-up Twitter accounts<\/a>.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.huffpost.com\/entry\/mike-pence-debate-fly-photoshop-battle_n_5f800df5c5b664e5babba9fc?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAEYxcksX22WVXr2fv5BTutXGpn5XBQn9t2VbgmRzWpNOVy9NjkG17fUcrnAmF1zlnfdgs7TZ4aECRgARYNRLIiW5sgnNAwOedO7ObS8OUledx2RAjamXY4L_gkGSmujeFOsFgPpnaPR1TeNVbyg39ERr8-NbNIqBq6JnsAPtJOMZ\">Zany photoshops<\/a>.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6UiBjq0ht7U\">YouTube remixes<\/a>. Run-of-the-mill election memery. Same as it ever was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And yet all that old fun didn\u2019t feel right. Not anymore. It was hollow. Brow-furrowing. At least it was for us. We\u2019d both been giddy participants in the presidential memeing of 2012. By 2016, we\u2019d grown&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.electionanalysis2016.us\/us-election-analysis-2016\/section-6-internet\/dark-magic-the-memes-that-made-donald-trumps-victory\/\">increasingly wary<\/a>&nbsp;of the pollution potentially carried by the memes people share. By 2020, we had little laughter left, just gnawing exhaustion. Being confronted by this rare moment of silly retro internet fun wasn\u2019t a reprieve. It was a reminder. We\u2019re in an emergency, and what does it even mean to have fun in an emergency?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With hindsight, it\u2019s clear that this emergency isn\u2019t solely a product of the Trump era. Like vast swaths of the U.S. political landscape, internet culture fun has long been dangerous. At its worst, the memey fun of 2012, and certainly of 2016, was explicitly bigoted. A lesson many,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/full\/10.1177\/2056305119849493\">including ourselves<\/a>, learned the hard way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even when internet culture fun wasn\u2019t explicitly dehumanizing, it too-often ignored anything beyond the joke. For years, the only serious rule was to take nothing seriously. The hallmarks of this fun were&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/you-are-here.pubpub.org\/pub\/wsl350qp\/release\/1\">irony, fetishization, and aloof antagonism<\/a>, and they left no room for context, no room to consider the consequences for those outside the laughter. Context and consequences didn\u2019t have to be addressed by the laughing&nbsp;<em>us,&nbsp;<\/em>because the laughing<em>&nbsp;us&nbsp;<\/em>tended to be protected from the harms inspiring their laughter and the harms that resulted from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even as many have learned those lessons, fetishistic fun still exists in 2020. It remains a giant, billowing red flag, especially for those of us worn down to gnawing exhaustion. Laughter that acts like 500 immigrant children aren\u2019t still separated from their parents; laughter that doesn\u2019t carry the weight of the 230,000 Americans dead from COVID-19; laughter that ignores Kamala Harris\u2019 stern rebuke of systemic racism because while she was speaking that fly landed right on the other guy\u2019s head, lol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, there\u2019s room\u2014and for many, there\u2019s need\u2014to be funny even when things are the opposite of fun. The problem isn\u2019t laughter itself; it\u2019s a specific kind of laughter that ignores context, consequence, and the life and death stakes for those struggling to survive. Approaches to Mike Pence\u2019s fly illustrate this distinction. David Frum,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/ideas\/archive\/2020\/10\/what-vp-debate-was-like-sound-off\/616654\/\">writing for<\/a> <em>The Atlantic<\/em>, leans into context in his response to the fly, pointing out just what it said about the Trump administration. The fly is a metaphor for inaction; it illustrates an utter lack of situational awareness. It is an apt vision of moral rot. This is humor that understands the weight of the moment, not fancy-free absurdity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Likewise, comedian<em>&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/sarahcpr?s=20\">Sarah Cooper<\/a>&nbsp;has persistently resonated during the 2020 election cycle for her short pantomime videos lip-synching Trump soundbites. With little more than Trump\u2019s own words, Cooper channels the theater of the absurd we collectively experience every day. Her humor doesn\u2019t deny the depth or the consequences of this absurdity, it leans right in, reminding us that we\u2019ve been living through multiple never-ending emergencies, exacerbated, if not orchestrated, by a commander-in-chief who cares not one whit about making things worse. Cooper reminds us of one such emergency in an&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/sarahcpr\/status\/1319268849150283777?s=20\">October 22 video<\/a>&nbsp;about Trump\u2019s climate change denial, a video she ends with a shot of a breaking glacier. Emblazoned words appear over the footage: \u201cClimate denial is not a joke. Help us fight back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cooper and Frum\u2019s examples offer strategies for being funny when nothing is fun. In an emergency, even our humor has to convey the significance of the moment, and to avoid the traps of irony, fetishization, and aloof antagonism. In an emergency, context must be foregrounded, not denied. And in an emergency that has disproportionately affected the most at risk and marginalized, we need humor to punch up at the causes, not down at the recipients. We don\u2019t need humor trampling those already trampled or humor pretending that power imbalances don\u2019t exist at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the right tenor, when it works against the impulse to fetishize, funny can do a lot of good. Funny can be a razor-sharp indictment or a source of solidarity. Or a gadfly landing on the crown of oppression. We need funny more than ever; we just need to be careful that our funny doesn\u2019t spoil things for everyone else.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr Ryan M. Milner Associate Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston. He studies how online interaction matters socially, politically, and culturally. He is the author and co-author of three books: The World Made Meme, The Ambivalent Internet, and You Are Here. Dr Whitney Phillips Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":24,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-430","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Election memes 2020, or, how to be funny when nothing is fun - Election Analysis - United States<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2020\/section-6-popular-culture-and-public-critique\/election-memes-2020-or-how-to-be-funny-when-nothing-is-fun\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Election memes 2020, or, how to be funny when nothing is fun - Election Analysis - United States\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dr Ryan M. 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Milner Associate Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston. He studies how online interaction matters socially, politically, and culturally. He is the author and co-author of three books: The World Made Meme, The Ambivalent Internet, and You Are Here. 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