In 2013, a cartoon dog sat in a burning room, sipped coffee, and declared "This is fine."

Little did that dog know it would become the mascot for how humanity handles crisis--used by everyone from Reddit users to Democrats to describe the Republican's state of denial regarding Climate Change and more. That little dog has helped people feel less alone in their struggles, changed how people frame political inaction and brought laughter to people's days.

This is the power of memes.

Despite being Gen Z, I've ignored memes for most of my life. I was terrified of becoming one of those consumption zombies who spend their days engulfing memes in a procrastination haze. I prided myself on morning runs, deep work sessions, and drinking straight black coffee.

But after exploring examples of memes changing society like the ones above and how they actually work, I've realized memes have much more value than being solely distraction traps. Through journeying with me into the sacred art and significance of meme-making, you'll learn what they reveal about human society and ourselves, how they work, and finally, how we can make them ourselves.

What Is a Meme, Really?

Before we can discuss memes as we know them, we need to understand where memes originated.

At its core, a meme is an idea that spreads from person to person within a culture. Memes are cultural genes—they replicate, mutate, and evolve through human minds and behaviors just without all the skin-pounding and sticky substance secretion genes need. Richard Dawkins first coined the term "meme" in his groundbreaking 1976 book The Selfish Gene, drawing parallels between biological and cultural evolution. Just as genes propagate themselves through bodies, memes propagate themselves through minds.

Yes, memes were invented by a scientist. No, he's probably not thrilled about what we've done with his theory.

Meme Spreading: The Science of Why That Cat Video Took Over Your Feed

Several key factors determine how far and fast a meme travels:

1. Emotional Impact
   • Humor (makes us want to share the joy)
   • Anger (drives engagement and debate)
   • Fear (creates urgency to warn others)
   • Awe (inspires us to spread wonder)

Other emotions can also encourage spreading but are generally not as strong. When I come across something sad, I don’t usually think, “Dang, I want to make someone else sad now!”

1. Incentive Structure
   • Social capital from sharing
   • Sense of group belonging from sharing
   • Perceived importance of spreading the message
2. Accessibility
   • Easy to understand
   • Quick to consume
   • Simple to share
   • Culturally relevant
   • Universal humor or adaptable to the specific context
3. Credibility
   • Source authority
   • Supporting evidence
   • Social proof

Christianity provides a fascinating example of how an effective meme complex--a combination of memes operating together—works. In gross simplification, it’s so effective because:

• Emotional Impact: Awe and fear especially are charged from The Bible, and community creates emotional bonds
• Incentive Structure: Heaven/hell belief system motivates evangelism
• Accessible: The Bible provides a canonical text
• Credible: Credible by God at least and tons of people are already Christian

Like a game of meme evolution, memes designed well for replication tend to survive, whereas ones not tend to die out. This explains the vast majority of memes that have survived or died out in history, including Christianity.

While memes do replicate, we shouldn't think of them as stagnant over time. Memes evolve faster than your phone becomes outdated. Think of meme complexes like DEI--Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Of course, DEI is much more complicated than this acronym, but we use the label as a meme to spread the spirit of DEI. As the meme of DEI has spread, it has changed, both literally in content and also in how others perceive it.

This can lead to meme wars...

When Memes Battle Each Other Like Pokemon: Meme Wars...

Meme wars occur when two memes fight between two or more groups of people.

It starts with a singular meme. A collection of people begin spreading the meme. As emotional attachment to the meme spreads and it interacts with other memes, people can start to feel anger, humor, awe, and more. Anger, in particular, attracts other collections of people spreading a conflicting meme.

Often, the two groups will stay secluded in their own echo chambers, creating a straw man meme for the other side's meme—a meme totem. This meme is a caricature of the original meme, often weaker and easier to argue against. In effect, two groups can become antagonistic toward each other not because they disagree but because they disagree regarding the straw man memes of both groups.

These false meme wars are responsible for a huge amount of societal polarization.

Republicans and Democrats, for example, are pros at creating a myriad of meme totems and then bashing at them over and over with their in-group. In effect, both sides think the other side are idiots, even though neither truly sees the other for who they are.

Why am I telling you this in a post on meme-making?

Because by understanding what memes are and how they work, you'll better understand how to make better memes and how memes can give you insight into the world at large. With that being said, let's explore the memes we know and love today: internet memes. Why are they so effective even compared to other memes:

• Emotional Impact
  • Humor is built into their DNA - they're literally designed to make you laugh
  • Can trigger outrage/anger through political/social commentary
  • Can create awe or fear depending on the meme
• Incentive Structure
  • Sharing funny memes makes you look cool/witty
  • Creating viral memes gives massive social clout
  • Being "in" on a meme reference creates instant social bonds
  • Understanding niche memes shows you belong to specific communities
  • Getting likes/shares provides dopamine hits
• Accessibility
  • Zero cost to consume or share
  • Can be created with just a phone
  • Spread at literally the speed of light
  • Cross language barriers through visual humor
  • Take seconds to understand
  • Can be endlessly remixed and modified
• Credibility
  • Anonymous creation means ideas stand on their own merit
  • Organic popularity shows true resonance
  • Community validation through upvotes/shares
  • Evolution happens in real-time based on what works
  • Bad memes die quickly, good ones spread exponentially

Now that we understand where memes come from, the dynamics of meme wars, and why internet memes are so effective, we can learn how they work. Let's dive into the principles of meme humor and explore some of the most popular meme formats so you can create your very own memes.

Meme Humor Principles: How to Make People Exhale Sharply Through Their Nose

Absurdity Absurdity is possibly the funniest and most common humor of memes. It relies on deliberately violating logical expectations and normal patterns of reality. It creates comedy through incongruity, non-sequiturs, and scenarios that defy reason while maintaining an internal consistency to their madness.

Strangefying Take something everyone knows and make it weird, or take something weird and make it feel normal.

Pattern Breaking Set up your audience's expectations like bowling pins, then throw a curveball instead of a bowling ball. Cliches are the death of funny. Don’t make another meme about procrastination or having too much homework—we get it.

Art Of Irony Great memes leverage irony or post-irony. Level one irony is sarcasm or putting two seemingly contradicting things together—like you’re definitely not wasting your time reading this article.

Post-irony is sarcasm that eventually makes its way back to sincerity--it goes two layers deep—Like how I ToTally ThiNk YoU’RE GoiNG to Make A FAntastic Meme After ThIS Post.

Comparison And Contrast Compare two seemingly different things or two seemingly contrasting things and humorously show why they are closer or farther than people think.

Exaggeration Way over dramatize something. You’REEE LOOOOOOOVVVVEEEELLLLYY.

Social Contract Breaking Take a social contract, such as not touching someone you don’t know too well, and break it explicitly. For example, asking someone during a TEDx Talk to tickle the person they are next to.

Layered Meaning Like an onion of humor, great memes have multiple layers of meaning that reward the viewer's cultural knowledge and attention to detail. Unfortunately, there are no layers to this joke—I peeled them all.

Concise Delivery If brevity is the soul of wit, memes are wit distilled into pure spirit - get to the funny fast or get scrolled past.

Build A World Create a bizarre world in your meme, and then use it to make a joke.

Visual-Verbal Dance The sweet spot in meme humor is when the image and text work together like partners in a dance, each making the other funnier. The format you choose should feel like it fits the meme you are making.

Format Innovation Great meme creators are like jazz musicians—they know the standards but aren't afraid to improvise and create something new. Often, the best memes use someone's expectations for a format and then break them.

Cultural Literacy The difference between a good meme and a great one often lies in how it taps into its audience's shared language and references.

Punchlines Like a comedian's punchline or a chef's soufflé, timing is everything. Great memes have a clear punch line for where to react. It's what separates something that makes us smile from something that makes us cry laughing.

The Meme Cookbook: Recipes for Internet Fame

You have to imitate before you can innovate.

Learning the most common meme formats will teach you the principles behind what makes memes work and give you insight into how you can use or break the principles for creating your own memes.

Two Choices

Give two choices: the humor coming in, how bad both are, how good both are, or the absurdity of them being put together. Humor often comes through comparison and contrast.

Category Progression

Starts with normal suggestions and escalates to increasingly extreme or absurd options. Humor generally comes from absurdity and exaggeration. 

Monkey Puppet

Humor comes from social awkwardness or from having to act as if nothing happened. It generally comes from empathy over a feeling of awkwardness.

Drake

The format was so popular that it survived longer than Drake's own popularity. It generally shows one top-panel thing being discarded and one bottom-panel thing (often less) conventional being embraced. Humor often comes through comparison and contrast.

Distracted Boyfriend

It shows a boyfriend looking at another girl blatantly while with his girlfriend. Humor often comes through social contract breaking or comparison and contrast.

Disaster Girl

Shows a girl looking at a disaster smiling. Generally, it points light at destroying something or someone terrible or someone having been the doer of that destruction. Humor often comes through exaggeration.

Epic Handshake

Two seemingly contrasting things coming together to form something terrible or great. Humor generally comes from comparison and contrast.

The Meta-Format

Take a common meme format and change it right at the end to surprise people.

In this case, the humor comes from breaking the fourth wall rather than combining two contrasting things.

Change My Mind

Humor comes from putting a controversial or entirely uncontroversial statement and challenging someone to change your mind.

Waiting Skeleton

Humor comes from the absurd amount of time it takes to wait for this thing. Humor generally comes from exaggeration.

I Bet He's Thinking About Other Women

Humor comes from thinking someone is thinking one thing when it's some completely absurd thought. Humor generally comes from irony and absurdity.

Whisper and Goosebumps

When someone whispers something into someone else's ear, they get goosebumps. Humor generally comes from the absurdity or randomness of the statement.

Expectations vs Reality

Plays on the contrast between idealized versions of situations and their much messier reality. Humor generally comes from comparison and contrast and absurdity.

The Increasingly Verbose Format

It takes a simple statement and makes it progressively more complicated and pretentious, often absurd. Humor generally comes from absurdity and exaggeration.

They're The Same Picture

Humor comes from them literally being the same thing, even though some people might not inherently associate them. Humor generally comes from comparison and contrast.

Made Up World Format

Completely make up a reality and create humor out of the absurdity.

So You Actually Want to Make a Meme: A TL;DR Guide

• Choose Your Fighter (Format, Or Joke Idea)
  • Pick a format and brainstorm jokes that might fit that format (see examples above)
  • Or come up with a joke topic or idea and pick the format that would make sense
  • Or if you're feeling spicy, break a format in a clever way
  • When in doubt use some of the classic formats above
• Check Your Joke's Pulse
  • Does it use at least one humor principle? (Absurdity, contrast, etc.)
  • How well does it hit emotional impact, incentive structure, accessability, and credibility? (It's very hard to hit all of them)
• Build That Bad Boy
  • Use any basic meme generator (imgflip.com or mematic are solid)
  • Font should be clear (Impact or Arial, not Comic Sans unless you're making a meme about making bad memes)
  • Keep text short and punchy
  • Make sure image quality isn't potato-grade. Unless you're making a meme about potatoes, then it's thematically appropriate.
• Test Drive It
  • Show it to one friend who'll be brutally honest. If they ask anything along the lines of if you're mom got into meme creation, scrap it--I'm sorry forgot this was a post on memes--scronk it.
  • If they say, "I don't get it," neither will the internet
  • If they exhale sharply through their nose, you're on the right track
  • If they actually laugh out loud, you've struck gold
• Release It Into The Wild
  • Pick the right platform for your audience
  • Time it right (no Christmas memes in July unless that's the joke)
  • Accept that 99.99% of memes die faster than your new year's resolutions--it's the circle of life
  • If it flops, try again.

The Sacred Art Of Mememaking

So there you have it--the sacred art of meme creation laid bare before you. And I haven't even made you pay any money yet. Remember, for every viral meme that makes millions laugh, thousands die sad, lonely deaths in /new. But don't let that stop you. After all, the "This is Fine" dog didn't give up when his room was literally on fire.

Somewhere between making terrible Drake-format memes and explaining to your friends why your meme is actually really funny, you might just create something that makes a stranger exhale sharply through their nose. And in this wild world of ours, making someone laugh is no small thing.

You'll also appreciate the nature of how ideas spread. Perhaps you'll gain a little of that wisdom mullah we call open-mindedness and curiosity.

And if anyone asks how you learned all this: