Memes are at the forefront of social media and the internet in general. For this assignment I am going to be looking at the original memes. In current times a meme can be almost anything, from a picture, to a funny video, to a funny phrase or action. But in the beginning of it all memes all followed the same norms and did the same thing. The genre if it has a name would be as I said previously “Original Memes”. These are the foundation of what many people base their sense of humor, careers, and even lives on. Organizations like Tik Tok and Instagram profit greatly off of memes and it all stems from a very simple template that the genre follows. It is typically a picture that is generally funny, a dorky looking teenager smiling with braces, a child smiling suspiciously Infront of a burning house and a weirdly drawn stick figure face. Overall, there are many kinds of images to choose from. The final step would be to place words in the top and/or bottom of the image. The words can be anything, from “finally” to “when you eat the last cookie”. The original meme genre is very free and not very constraining having only those two requirements to allow for something to fall in that category. So, when going about creating any kind of content for the genre you only need an image of any kind and a caption to go with it that is short.
The purpose of making content for the genre is very simple and it’s to make people laugh. Often times people don’t do enough of it and this genre is focused solely on doing just that. Although the humor can become dark for some people it stays quite light and very interesting to see the progression of memes and how our sense of humor has changed so drastically from the Original Memes to now. The audience follows the same path as the requirement for pictures and captions in there being no designated audience. It’s for anybody that happens to come across it. Although its mainly teenagers that divulge in memes and make them, that doesn’t mean that the genre is catered to them specifically, it’s for anyone with a sense of humor. And being how it is, the genre is perfectly suited for the audience and purpose behind making it because it has fulfilled its purpose ever since they began to be made and when your audience only has the requirement of having a sense of humor that makes it perfectly suited for the audience as well. Thus, I would say that Original memes hold a special place in many Young adults’ hearts and this genre is still being used to this day despite the change that memes have made as a whole, a good original meme can get a laugh out of anybody.
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