New types of online humor/commentary
June 18, 2013 8:17 AM

What are the successors to photo memes as new forms of online comment/humor?

In other words, new ways to appropriate/repurpose existing content and resources, in order to make a joke and/or a point. Two examples:

(1) The what should we call me Tumblr and all the similar projects: captioned animated GIFs with a further caption added to apply them to a different situation.

(2) The Bic lady pen and other cases where people write fake Amazon reviews to mock an offensive or ridiculous product.

What are some others?
posted by pete_22 to Society & Culture (7 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
When people on Tumblr use hashtags on a post to make a side-of-the-mouth commentary about the post, rather than as an indexing tool.
posted by ostro at 8:28 AM on June 18, 2013


Don't know about successors but there are lots of gaming videos on youtube where people play / review games and those can sometimes be funny. pewdiepie is tragically unfunny but every now and then he posts a silly reaction montage that makes me laugh.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:37 AM on June 18, 2013


Another new form I have noticed on tumblr is the "non-animated" gif...an image with fine lines or subtle color variations or both that appears to be animated as you scroll the page due to moire effects between the image and screen pixels...not sure if I'd call it humor per se, but it def seems to be a new thing...
posted by sexyrobot at 9:04 AM on June 18, 2013


Reaction videos in general. And Vine seems to be a pretty rich source of new types of jokes - see Ryan Gosling Won't Eat His Cereal, etc.
posted by peachfuzz at 11:02 AM on June 18, 2013


Here's some reaction gifs.
posted by General Malaise at 11:09 AM on June 18, 2013


Other forms of remixed imagery to be funny probably include webcomics (e.g.: LARP Trek and infographics (e.g.: Oatmeal (although no remixed material used here, but there are certainly better examples)).
posted by KMB at 2:22 PM on June 18, 2013


Hm OK, I hadn't heard the term "reaction GIF" but it seems like the Tumblr I linked to is a subset of that. The hashtags thing is another perfect example.
posted by pete_22 at 5:43 AM on June 19, 2013


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