Memes translate despite language barriers

“I can haz cheezburger?”

It was the meme that launched a million cat jokes. Once upon a time, someone decided to slap this grammatically challenged sentence onto a picture of a fat gray cat.

From that day forth, one of the Internet’s most popular jokes — the lolcat — was born.

Memes are hard to take seriously. Most students use them to avoid their work.

According to Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, a meme is a cultural idea that repeats itself like a gene. Sometimes it repeats perfectly; sometimes it mutates into different variations.

Nevertheless, in all their ridiculousness, memes manage to do something extraordinary. They make humor cross cultural boundaries. They make people all over the world laugh at the same stupid stuff.

Although the original lolcat featured one cat with one misspelled phrase, there are now thousands of different cats with different misspelled phrases floating around the Internet. The lolcat spread, mutated and spread some more.

Everyone from journalists to politicians to academics has waxed poetic about the Internet’s ability to foster cooperation.

Though experts normally focus on things like information access and global fundraising, the silly jokes that show up on our Facebook newsfeeds are far more influential than abstract concepts.

Internet memes are examples of multicultural cooperation so simple, barely anyone thinks of them in such lofty terms.

Even as the global economy slides and countries peek at each other with increasing suspicion, a big chunk of us still laugh at the same jokes. We even work together to produce them.

Culture is so important in humor because nearly all jokes concern one of four primary social drives: affiliation, dominance, sex and novelty, according to Dutch psychologist Gert Jan Hofstede. We all want to have friends, feel powerful, attract people and experience new things. Most societies require us to cover up these urges with logic; jokes help us reveal them in an non-intimidating manner.

But the fourth drive, novelty, is different. Novel jokes appeal to what’s ridiculous and unexpected.

Those who want their jokes to become popular have a strong incentive to appeal to novelty. The more ridiculous something is, the more likely it is to be considered ridiculous all around the globe.

That’s what memes tap into: Our desire to see something so bizarre, it would make anyone laugh. In other words, if you want to get famous on the Internet, you’d better put your culture aside and figure out what’s funny to the rest of the world.

For example, consider the Swedish version of the lolcat. It’s a picture of a man with a horse’s head, captioned with “snel hest,” a misspelling of “snall hast” (Swedish for “nice horse”). People outside of Sweden might not understand the caption, but the idea that it’s strange for humans to have animal heads is pretty universal.

One Japanese meme started with a videogame glitch that made characters look like they were pulling crazy dance moves.

First, someone set the dancing to a song and uploaded the clip on YouTube.

Then, someone made an animated version. Finally, people have imitated the dance in real life. One of these people wears a horse mask.

Coincidence? I think not.

Makers of memes face a challenge: creating something that taps into our common sense of humor — a significant and underrated part of our common humanity.

How often are we asked to forget cultural assumptions for the sake of something as simple as a joke?

Memes are kind of beautiful that way. They should give us all comfort that — if nothing else — we can put our differences aside long enough to laugh at stupid cats.

 

Maya Itah is a senior majoring in communication.