On Internet memes. I tried to avoid them in this week’s column, but I couldn’t.

An Internet meme is a fancy, modern re-branding of the word trend. Specifically, a meme is an online trend, usually a little link of images, songs, videos, lists and other generally droll sweet nothings that ricochets around the Web and creates a uniquely global sense of cultural sharing and exchange.

And that’s exactly why I couldn’t avoid them in this week’s column.

But here’s why I wanted to: a meme, as defined by Richard Dawkins in 1976’s The Selfish Gene, is an adaptation of the word gene, referring not only to the self-replicating, biological unit of our biologies, but to our cultural evolution as well. It should be more than just comedy or humour. A meme therefore is just as much about the adaptation and transmission of cultural information as it is about the content. The content is the icing on top. And that’s why I intend to tackle memes later in this series.

However, given the preponderance of Internet meme content to be concerned with funny stuff, when considering the Web’s effect on comedy and humour, they’re virtually impossible to ignore.

David Thair, a six-year veteran of the BBC Comedy Unit and current Senior Content Producer of Social Media Tools at the broadcaster, got in touch with Untangling the Web to offer his thoughts on memes. He says this:

If it’s humour that is unique to the web that you’re after, and especially the way that the internet has influenced comedy, then you should take a deeper look into memes - especially image macros. I know you said you’re not interested in the links passed around by email… but this is actually a crucial part of what makes humour on the web special and different.
 
Considering how long it’s been around, it’s taken a while for memes to leak out of messageboards and toward the mainstream. They’re just about getting there - just look at the humour section of Waterstones come Christmas time.
 
I found it fascinating that I worked online at BBC Comedy for six years yet a huge amount of the humour I consumed in my spare time was generated by my friends, in forums: remixing and re-writing cartoon strips like Nemi, creating fictional personas and setting them loose on the web, or parodying ourselves.

But what is it that is unique about the medium? Thair first talks about its ability to produce quick-fire topical reactions to current events:

The web means almost instant reaction to an event is possible. This is something that traditional broadcasters are struggling to compete with. Just think - not so long ago, ‘topical’ comedy was, in this country, mainly limited to weekly television shows (Have I Got News For You) or radio (The Now Show) or in the US, more frequently, where they have long-running personality-based topical shows with greater resource.
 
But with the internet and especially since the rise of Twitter and Facebook, topical reactions are near-instant, topics spread like wildfire - and thousands of people who never would have touched a forum are playing along with meme-based humour in the form of hashtag games. This is all happening at a speed incomprehensible to mainstream traditional media.

And second, he talks about that old chestnut, audience participation:

And yet anyone - the audience - can participate. Running jokes form, change, recombine: another aspect of this I’ve noticed emerge recently is the crowdsourced nature of online comedy. Where once this stuff was happening hidden away on forums, now it lives on blogs and we get the likes of Passive Aggressive Notes, of course any number of LOLcats, and Single Serving Blogs for any number of bewildering topics.

Finally, he delves into one more important technological affordance: the ability to publish (and subsequently gather around) things that would normally never get past the traditional gatekeepers:

Another element of online humour is that it can be downright bizarre. The kind of stuff that would never make it past a TV exec’s in-tray racks up thousands of fans. Communities form around shared cultural reference points and incredible things happen. b3ta and Weebl’s Stuff being classic examples.

I wanted to find out more, so I sent David a few specific questions:

How important is YouTube/Twitter/Facebook to online comedy?
 
The format of Twitter obviously facilitates shortform comedy. It’s the perfect medium for one-liners and retweeting makes spreading a good gag - with credit - even easier. Linking to a photo on Twitter also allows for the creation of old-fashioned ‘caption gags’ - with the text to setting up the joke, and the punchline delivered as an image.
 
YouTube - and video on the web in general - has encouraged huge numbers of people to get in front of a camera and provided them with an audience. People who would never have dared try standup in front of a live audience will post videos online. When I ran Comedy Soup, the BBC’s user-generated comedy site, one of the biggest joys was when users who previously stuck to writing would report that we encouraged them to step in front of the camera (mainly thanks to challenges we set) and they never looked back.
 
For more traditional sketch-type artists, there have been some mainstream success stories. You might have heard of The Lonely Island (if not, here’s my favourite video). They were already popular before YouTube took off (they used to post QuickTimes). Just a fun comedy song/sketch group making their own videos and posting online. Now, they are part of Saturday Night Live and making big-budget comedy music videos with well-known artists.
 
Then there’s the video-bloggers! Undoubtedly one of the most successful is web-artist Ze Frank. For one year every weekday he produced The Show. Ze Frank is very, very funny, the editing was snappy and as the show developed he built a huge community of viewers thanks to the essential involvement of user-generated contributions (now commonplace on 6 Music!). Though The Show only lasted a year, you can easily spot Ze’s influence on the new generations of YouTube v-loggers. And yes, they are mostly terrible.
 
…but sometimes they aren’t. There’s something about a charismatic, funny vlogger which means they can attract astonishingly large followings on YouTube. They are often very young (like their audience). The same audiences who are rejecting (or simply unaware of) traditional TV will happily watch up to 10 minutes of nothing but one person talking into a webcam on a regular basis. But they are thought to have short attention spans and can’t cope with regular TV!
 
Is it possible to have a “sophisticated” comedy online, rather than a series of memes?
Yes… to a point. I think Ze Frank was. And for example the incredible works of Harry Partridge, the one-man animation studio best known for Saturday Morning Watchmen, are sometimes (not always) very sophisticated parodies and technical wonders.
 
But I’d argue that at some point, if you increase the production values, the size of the team, the length of the material… you’re basically just ending up with television on the internet. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it’s weird how online audiences can be less accepting of something with noticeably high production values trying to compete in the same space. These same people will be happy to torrent Family Guy of course.
 
The other thing about not being restricted to 6x30 min episodes is that online comedy ‘series’ (be they blog posts, videos, animations etc) can afford room to breathe, develop and adapt as their audience increases and responds. In-jokes and cultural references have the space to be seeded. In a way these long-running formats have more in common with the way popular radio DJs maintain their popularity.
 
How much has what we find funny online affected what we find funny offline - and what comedians produce for offline audiences?
I think that depends on how much you consume of either - what your lifestyle is and how you consume content. It seems to me television is unnerved by the increasing popularity of online comedy and feels it need to respond to it. The very worst outcome is those programmes that simply try to repackage ‘virals’ and put them on TV. I think Jon Stewart and Colbert are way ahead of us in creating an intelligent response - they often cleverly reference memes and internet culture by joining in. Not just reporting on it with an unnecessary linking device. They assume at least some of their audience will be aware of it. They know they live in a partially online space.
 
But they are special cases - they have regular, topical, well-resourced shows. They aren’t sitcoms. When it comes to television, I don’t think that comedy needs to try and accommodate the internet. Funny programme makers should stick to what they do best. There’s still a place for great longform comedy! And the best bits will inevitably find their way online to be snacked upon, remixed, referenced and shared, possibly finding an even wider audience.