Meme-ing the Virus

Humor nowadays is always a bit abstract and difficult to grasp if you're not "in" to internet culture. A significant portion of memes make fun of current events and various tidbits about what's happening in the world. 

It's no wonder, then that people are making memes about the coronavirus. From jokes about someone playing "Plague Inc" on the Area 51 computer to an updated five second rule, memes about the virus are cropping up everywhere. Some of them are really funny. 

I think the current generation's way of dealing with stress is to lampoon it through the joke format that the internet has made possible over the past two decades. Laughing in the face of danger is something that has always been an option, but when it comes to this generation, we laugh in the face of tragedy in a different manner than the generation before us. 

Memes are inherently sharable and alterable. Every single person with an image editing program can make a meme about anything they want. And, when these memes are dumped onto sites like Reddit and 4chan, they are rated and perused. Only the best memes float to the top of the bunch. Since coronavirus memes appear on the front pages of these sites regularly, it seems that people are reacting positively to these memes and jokes. 

What about laughing in the face of adversity is so attractive? At the very least, it enables us to let off a bit of steam that has accumulated due to these happenings. But I don't believe that's all. I think that the specific category of jokes that target our deepest fears is sometimes funnier than those that are more mundane. Laughing at danger is more cathartic than laughing at someone failing a bike trick. 

I think that, in these troubling times, we should laugh as much as we can at the monster that is stalking us. Laughter will make us feel better, and quite possibly help us survive the winter of quarantine that is upon us. 

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