Memes and Mashups
This meme pictures Morpheus from The Matrix in the classic “What if I told you” meme. The meme states, “What if I told you Freud wasn’t an actual psychologist?” When asked about psychology, and even in some high school and (disturbingly) college level course, Freud is lauded to be the “founder of psychology.” Perhaps this meme wouldn’t be humorous to all audiences, and perhaps some wouldn’t believe it. In my experience with non-psych majors, they will, on average, assume the discipline of psychology follows Freud’s ideas. In the traditional sense of the meme, and of The Matrix in general, this message follows the motif of providing information designed to “wake people up.”
Although Morpheus (Laurence Fishburn) never directly asks Neo (Keanu Reeves), “What if I told you…?” these memes (perhaps ironically) originally convey some sort of enlightening “shortcut” to tedious tasks, or a revelation (i.e., that Fishburn also plays Cowboy Curtis). These memes have moved from “enlightening” to “humorous” by describing ideas that are not revolutionary. Since the Morpheus “What if I told you” meme is associated with working advice and interesting concepts, the memes that turn this idea on its head use the meme to convey the opposite (i.e., what if I told you that you can go to the gym without telling everyone on Facebook, what if I told you that pay phones are disappearing to make it harder for everyone to escape the matrix).
Pictured is an obscure painting from the middle ages. A woman is looking off into the distance, her eyes narrowed, and face contorted into a general unpleasant expression. She is holding a baby who has more hair than a baby should. The caption for this image states, “When you’re mad at God because he gave you a hairy baby.”
There is a broad movement to use these modernly artistically-inept photos for memes because they directly lend themselves to humor. Of course, during the time period they were produced, they wouldn’t have seemed as funny as they do today. This meme works by displaying a painting that could be interpreted as ridiculous (hairy baby) and drawing attention to the ridiculous element via captioning.
This meme pictures a cat wearing a suit, sitting down for (presumably) breakfast while drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. The juxtaposition of an animal in such a prosaic role is made more humorous by the cat’s deadpan expression, as though this is nothing new, as though this is how he spends every day. The cat’s facial position helped me decide on the mundane captioning, “Cathy, is my meow mix ready yet? I’ve got a presentation in an hour.” The captioning involves cat and human qualities mixing together to create an overall image that speaks to the experience of having a regular 9-5 job.