Nikos Lanides
So the Queen of England is dead, and it’s taken the whole internet by storm and it’s really interesting. You would think people would be unanimously sad about it, but nope people just made memes about it. Which is what we’re talking about in this article: the memes.
It’s September 8th and it’s revealed at about 12:00 PM that the Queen of England has croaked, and for the rest of the day people start talking about it. Before the end of the day it is practically THE news story of the year. Then something odd happened. Instead of respect paid to a royal, a flood of jokes swarmed in and now it’s what we call a meme. For instance, this one: Now for some this makes no sense. Why would you make a joke about this kind of thing? The answer is pretty simple. It’s funny, and we’ve been doing it for years. Remember what happened with Prince Phillip. (he was the Queen of England’s husband who passed away in April of last year)! The thing that made those jokes so funny was that he looked like an extra from the walking dead after leaving the hospital. The jokes we made were different but the reasoning was still the same: it’s inherently funny and irreverent. Memes can do a lot of things but in this instance, it completely took the emotion out of Queen Elizabeth’s death. If I could I would love to show you more of these memes and explain them a bit more in-depth. Now of course this meme above was before The Queen died but I think it highlights that the internet didn’t really take her that seriously. All the internet saw in her was an old person in a position of power and opportunities to poke fun at that. Case in point, one of the longest-running jokes on the internet is when is the Queen going to die? Jschlatt, who made the tweet early, is notorious for just posting dates and saying cryptic stuff about the Queen and it ended with a hilarious coincidence. People were just waiting for the day to come and now that has happened, old jokes about her are resurfacing and new ones are popping out like baby rabbits. To illustrate how the internet will really joke about anything no matter the seriousness of the topic, I show you this final meme.
People said this image was of the Queen of England finally escaping captivity when of course, it’s some old crazy lady climbing some structure in Britain. The internet doesn’t care though, they never care when it comes to comedy. What makes them laugh, and it can’t really be stopped. Everyone can be made fun of, and no celebrity, nor royal is safe. The point I wanted to make with this story is the insanity of how memes work. I want people to ask questions as to why some things are memed and some things aren’t. The whole internet hivemind thing is an interesting topic I feel. The Queen dying was just a good way to ask about it.