Scumbag Stacy withholds sex from him while slutting around with non-nerds. Sheltering Suburban Mom parents him with racist and classist views. Scumbag Steve borrows money from him but doesn’t hit on them. The most popular advice memes skew toward this group’s values.įor example, Scumbag Steve, Sheltering Suburban Mom, and Scumbag Stacy all interact with an implied young straight male. The taxonomy of the traditional advice meme lets us easily identify its core audience as young, nerdy middle-class straight white men. But the medium still has an identifiable range of expression, one even more specific than the traditional advice meme. Even the character’s expression might not match the text’s tone. It seems almost any character can be used with almost any text. These characters aren’t such blank slates as Minions, but they all combine a mild trickster personality with lovability.

Some generic characters and abstract decoration round things out. It was easy to recognize an advice meme.įacebook’s “Shut Up I’m Still Talking” group has 2.5M followers.īut they’re just one member of a recurring cast: Garfield, Betty Boop, Jeff Dunham’s puppet Walter, the cast of Looney Tunes (especially Tweety, Daffy, and Taz), and an occasional Donald Duck or Goofy. Outside the occasional watermark, the look was clean. Older meme images were superimposed on a colored pinwheel backdrop, which eventually disappeared as new memes simply used an entire photo. Designīy the time it got popular, the traditional advice meme had settled into a standard format: An image, usually square, with two lines of text at top and bottom in the Impact typeface, white text with a black stroke. And on Facebook pages like Shut Up I’m Still Talking, Words of Wisdom, Heart Touching Fun, Love This Pic, and Bringing Humor to Your Day With Love, they remake memes in their own image. Their sense of style is less influenced by irony or tech design. The “cool” part of the internet has largely abandoned the advice meme format, and now visual memes can take almost any form.īut over the past few years, the advice meme trickled down to the lower class of the internet: boomers, parents, late adopters, mainstreamers, and possibly the actual lower class. 4chan’s best memes now comment on their own disappearing relevance reddit’s /r/adviceanimals is a quiet community that repurposes memes for personal storytelling. But whether through an aging userbase, competition from sites like Tumblr and Twitter, or just the inevitably shifting sands of the internet, they haven’t birthed a dominant meme format in years.

The two forum sites had been the twin towers of meme creation for years, inventing and spreading Rickrolling, LOLcats, and Rage Comics. At their cultural pinnacle, advice memes mostly spread on 4chan and reddit (and some aggregation sites that stole from them).

Minion meme creator