Most memes are posted at a propitious moment to have optimum comedic effect. It must fall into the meme of the time (1) or the comments with be flooded with the worst possible response: “stale meme (2).” It is almost more difficult than sending your joke in a popping group chat before the subject is changed (3). Almost. Everyone remembers the overload of memes during the presidential election in 2016. All of these memes include an element of Kairos due to their postings in the weeks before the voting began. The meme I included is actually a meme-ception.
The image above is a meme inside a meme with both aspects showing Kairos. The meme surfaced early enough before the election to use the caption “Which folder to use hmm” but close enough to the election that it was included in the meme of the time. The memes in the folders will have strong Kairos after the election. Once Trump won the election, he became the meme of the time. Honestly, I think it would be difficult to find anything with more Kairotic effect than this meme. There was clearly a lot of thought to the current nation news put into this post.
All memes have a single purpose: to make their audience laugh. Oddly enough, this is a form of persuasion. The memes are persuading people to find comedy in the post. Through ethos and pathos, the above meme successfully convinced me to laugh. In order to connect with teenagers, you must establish your credibility. Doesn’t it seem so much easier to laugh at a meme posted by a stranger online than an adult stranger telling the same joke in real life? Teenagers connect with other teenagers, and knowing the meme of the time establishes credibility. If you know the meme of the time, then you are “one of us.” Automatically accepted. When it comes to the rhetoric device pathos, the election was very emotional for many online. Whether you were voting Hillary or Trump, you were emotionally invested. The sense of humor among the new generation is involving jokes with things to which we are attached. Using something as emotional as the election and making a joke out of it sounds odd, but it is the exact formula this generation craves for comedy.
The meme did its job. It made people laugh. The post received many likes and comments showering praise on a job well done. Meme accounts across Instagram reposted the meme. The intended audience was clearly motivated by the appeal. Thanks to all the things we thought were useless in high school English (Kairos, pathos, and ethos) we can now enjoy memes online!
(1) Meme of the time – when something is happening in society, Instagram will be flooded with memes of the incident making that something the “meme of the time” (Side note: sometimes the meme of the time can be something old resurfacing that people are just now making into a joke)
(2) Stale meme – the most degrading reaction to a meme because it means your meme is old or not funny
(3)
I think it is really interesting how our generation makes jokes about pretty much everything. It seems to be how we cope with the current world and everything happening in it. Memes really do add more than just comedy to our lives. They are informative and persuasive about current events. They also find success in kairos. I never would have thought a meme would be an example of something we learned in English, but it definitely is.
This was a fun deconstruction of a meme, I did in fact laugh at this meme when it was going around the internet which adds to your argument about its rhetorical appeals. Again, A+ use of memes.