Oxford has a lot of student societies but earlier this year second-year PPEist and Corpuscle Ada Pospiszyl noticed that there was no society for lovers of the iconic images we so love to share online; a requiem for a meme. She decided to rectify this by creating the Oxford Dank Memes Society, a Facebook page for Oxford students to share whatever memes necessary. Assisted by her fellow founders Mark Scott, Srishti Suresh, Shane Finn and Harrison Edmonds, they have turned the page into Oxfordâs premier destination for light relief and Doge pictures. She met with me to discuss internet culture, Pepe the Frog and the secrets of Oxfordâs heart of dankness.
I started by asking how the society was first established. âThere was one event late last Hilary that we called the Dank Memes Society launch, but then there was no plan for an actual society. We just kind of did it as a joke. Then by the end of term I was obviously doing everything I could do to avoid doing work, so I thought âHey, letâs make it into a real society, thatâll be really funny. The meme culture is not very strong in Oxford, because we think weâre all so serious, and we have to have Serious Societies. I just thought, you know, it would be an interesting experiment to set one up. If you go on Open Oxford, sometimes theyâll start posting memes, and most of them are irrelevant, unfunny – theyâre not dank at all. Theyâre way too political, and mostly like two years old. So we wanted to try and do something better.â
A truly dank meme, to Adaâs mind, âhas to be relatable. The whole funniness comes from the fact that this joke is repeated so many times, even if it wasnât funny at the beginning. I mean, thereâs nothing funny about Pepe – itâs just a frog, right? Thatâs what made it funny in the beginning. Itâs not a funny image, itâs a miserable-looking frog. Itâs sad if anything, but that repetition makes it funny when it does appear. Itâs like a second level of funniness, if you know what I mean. It just sort of comes from nowhere. So I think the secret to a good meme is just accepting that itâs basically quite lame, and sort of laughing at yourself.â
What are the presidentâs favourite memes? âI love Pepe, just because I think it represents everything that memes are. Itâs so lame. I like Doge as well, just because I think itâs very hard to make an offensive Doge meme. I donât think political memes are the best memes. I think the best memes are just really pure, and I think that Doge represents that. I also love that it lets you use Comic Sans âironicallyâ. Memes are a very twenty-first century thing, because of the way theyâre shared so many times, and that makes them funny. I think that interconnectedness is something thatâs quite basic to all memes.â
Memes can also play a unique social, even political role for society members. âIf you go on, I donât know, a Libertarian fan page, there will be so many memes. If you go on a Communist fan page, you have Sassy Socialist Memes, about five different Communist memes fan pages. Every single sub-group in society has their own memes, so I donât think there is a specific group that likes memes more than others, but I suppose some groups are maybe more open about it. Although on Dank Memes Society we try not to encourage too many political memes, because people get way too excited, and it often becomes quite offensive really easily. Thatâs not the point of memes.â
Being an admin for a group like this also has its challenges. âOnce, one of the admins thought it would be a good idea to accept a middle-aged woman whoâd been on Facebook for five days onto the group, and she started just offering everyone a cheap loan. So that was a bit embarrassing. A lot of the stuff that gets posted is quite off-limits, like swastikas, porn, that sort of stuff. Not a lot, but we do get it frequently. Itâs a bit gross, but then you just click âdeleteâ. But sometimes you do get borderline cases where something is a bit funny but also not really OK, especially at the very beginning there were a lot of Socialist memes. Some of them were funny, but some of them were just, like pictures of Stalin going âHa ha, I donât know where all the capitalists wentâ, and then a picture of a gulag or whatever. It might be funny to a small group of people, but itâs not really OK. At the same time you donât want to discourage people from posting, so itâs quite hard sometimes to decide whether something is so offensive that you donât want it there.â
âIt can sometimes be difficult to get people to try and make jokes about their weaknesses, so many Oxford students think we all need to be having serious debates about freedom and so on. Thatâs good in a way, because it means weâre having meaningful and important discussions, but I think itâs also good to try and take a step back and laugh at it all.â
How would Ada persuade potential new members to sign up? âItâs easy and itâs free. If you feel bored, if you have to write an essay, you can always go on the group, have a bit of fun, or judge the bad memes, because letâs face it, those do get posted. Thereâs nothing to lose. really, and there is so much dankness to gain.â