I'm just happy you thought it was funny, dear

~~:.|:;~~
- Classic, eternal.

Especially with niche internet culture like here on Lemmy. Very few people understand the “highly sophisticated” bean memes we’ve got.
- "So a guy asking how not to shit for a weekend was funny for a whole month?"
  When you put it that way we sound weird!
  
  Wait, there's actual context behind the bean memes? I've been missing out.
- I have been around when the bean meme came and I still don't know how that meme started.
  
  Nobody does but we all just pretend
  
  Someone stole it from Reddit who stole it from Instagram.
- Or the orb-pocalypse
  
  Or the jeans era
- You mean the memes about the small misshapen orbs?

The best memes are buried in 6 layers of irony and meta-references.
- And accessed via a proxy of 6 VPNs
  
  What the fuck did you just say about me?
- Got some reference material?
  
  Is this loss?

I usually don't have a hard time explaining referencial humor when it's, like, an older movie that was super popular in my day to a younger person who hasn't seen it; but memes are often inexplicable unless you just know.
Example: ~~:.|:;~~
- They will find this etched into mountains, and future historians will never know why
- :.|:;
  Le gasp
- You forgot the strikethrough for the four panels ~~:.|:;~~
  
  I thought it looked wrong when I pasted it but couldn't figure out why lol
- "The game"
  
  No , why , why would you do that ?!

I tried explaining to a SO why stappling bread to trees was funny or why "Cat." was peak humor.
I don't think I've ever seen someone questioning my sanity and theirs by association this clearly in any other conversation.

Explaining loss humor is impossible
- So like, she had a miscarriage and is crying about it and her boyfriend makes it just in time to see the results and uh yeah it's the funniest thing ever why are you leaving
  
  No, wait, it gets better. Get this. Circle jerk about it for a couple of decades and it gets funnier, oh, OK, still going.
  
  At least the ඞmongus generation understands the fun in hiding references everywhere.
- I still don't understand how it's funny
  
  At this point we're like three jokes deep.
  The original reaction to the comic was kind of a collective chuckle of "Whahahahat the fuck?" Because the comic was like discount store brand Penny Arcade, irreverent bullshit gamer humor, and then comes the sudden plotline that the girlfriend character has a miscarriage.
  Like, Loss itself isn't bad in and of itself; telling the story of the character's journey through the hospital with no dialog, it's competent...but it stood in such contrast to what the comic had been about for so long and the audience just wasn't on board with it that it became a controversy. And Buckley's clap back against it and the following drama made it memetic.
  At some point, the imagery became so recognizeable even in the abstract that it became a prank to communicate the idea of the comic in as abstract a form as possible, hence the "Is this Loss" meme. Somewhere between rickrolling and "you just lost the game."
  
  I think it 's (Edit: started out) more about how Tim Buckley is terrible than anything. (Edit: Then from there it) sort of collapsed into its own joke. No one really knows or cares about the context anymore, its become a self-contained meme with no real meaningful connection to Tim, the original comic, or its message now.
  
  Its not "haha!" funny, but rather "aha!" funny.
  
  I think it's more for fun than funny. Like The Game or the 👌.
- i always refer people to this documentary.
- Saddam meme too.

Chuck Testa
- Oh no there's a bear in my bed!
  
  Nope!

Honestly, things like that remind me how vast the internet is. There are some things that I think are just ubiquitous that my friend has never heard of before. She had never heard of Creepy Pastas. She had never seen Long Long Man. She didn't know what an SCP was. I was baffled. Made me think about my own digital world, and what sources I may be completely blind to.
- dude, I love creepypastas, long long long man AND scp
  
  Count another in these parts of the internet!
- At least I know what SCP is. I use it sometimes.
  
  Neither SCP, nor long long man are ringing any bells for me

so uh this guy once ordered a pizza with no toppings but only beef on the left side and that's why I have a 40-year-old man's face on my shirt with a pizza background.

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Memes are art.

Ceiling cat haz contempt for your puny 7 years of historical warez. Leave Brittany alone with your shallow funnies.
- ... Britney. Britney.
  Christ, that meme's old enough to drop bombs on Yemen.
  
  Ceiling cat encourages your masturbation to Britney.
- Leave Brittany alone
  OG reference right there.
- I pity the fool who's balls aren't eaten.
- finally, a meme I'm actually too young to understand! someone gimme lore pls
  
  I get to be useful!
  Ceiling cat is a reference to possibly the earliest generation of memes. They mostly involved cats. Ceiling cat was a popular one of a cat poking its had down through a hole in a ceiling, captioned "ceiling cat is watching you masturbate" or something similar. The odd grammar/spelling is of the same Era, where these cat memes would be spoken in the "voice" of a cat. The most famous example is "I can haz cheezburger"
  Leaving Britney alone is a reference to an early Era of YouTube video, where an actor bawling at the camera ranted about how people were being too mean to Britney Spears, a famous pop star. It was hotly debate whether the contents of the video were genuine or acting. Remember, this was before Snopes, even.
  I think that was everything?
- Frosted butts

There are tiers? I must not be an internet person.
- the tiers are just that user's headcanon, actually memes are on a spectrum of interdependency
  
  memes are on a spectrum
  Autistic memes are lit tho
- you're not a person?

Me explaining why anything is the way it is at work...
Well you see...before I started they had this hare-brained idea, and I've been trying to fix it every year since.
- My career has been long enough that in hindsight I've been the one with the harebrained idea and I swear it was a good idea at the time!
  
  At the time it was the best way to duct tape over someone else's long-forgotten but recently uncovered cut corner.
  And so the cycle continues.
  
  This is the bad thing about finding a good employer...the type you feel okay staying at a long time because they treat you well, the pay is reasonable and the benefits are great.
  That's where I'm at now, and I'm starting to get bit in the ass by my own harebrained ideas, too.

yeah...

especially if they don't know what a trans person is
- Who doesn't know what a trans person is?
  
  You'd be surprised lol
  One of the funniest that shows just how little people know is this, a conversation I heard from someone like a month ago: "[name] is nonbinary, she uses they/them pronouns right?"
  for context this is a Gen z person, not even a retired grandma who doesn't go around queer people at all, there was a group of really fruity folk next to them about dieing for their whole conversation

Same with young people and older Internet stuf and often you can't even show it because it was some flash application on newgrounds or something like that. NEDM, Bob the ball, Sinnlos im Weltraum, Kimbles Homepage, rotten, tubgirl and whatnot
- newgrounds still exists
  
  As does ruffle, a browser extension that adds an alternative open source runtime for flash in the modern age
- Weeblsstuff.

I often laugh about things that are not always funny haha but sometimes horrible nonsense. So now when I laugh about it, my wife gives me the "do I want to know or not" look and I have an escape route to tell her its not really something funny or something she wouldn't think is funny

You sonofabitch, I'm in.
- So there's this kid and it's about a heist parody...wait let me start over. Theres this show with a smart old guy and a kid, kinda like back to the future, but like.....