Pairing: Memes and Memes

Taking one meme and using it with another one can produce unexpected internet delights.

Graham, the human evolved to survive car crashes, was created by an Australian road safety board and an artist, Patricia Piccinini. Graham was designed to prove a point: the human body cannot as it now is configured optimally survive a car crash. The moral of the story is that if you don't look like Graham, you should drive more carefully. But Graham's bizarre appearance has done more in the service of internet humor than road safety. He is a meme now, and he belongs to all of us. Like This Is Fine.

This meme, derived from K.C. Green’s Gunshow comic, highlights a willingness to ignore the disaster going on all around us, either because of denial or out of a sense of self preservation. Recently misused by the Republican party, This Is Fine shows how any meme can quickly get out of control, like a fire eating through a room.

Pictured above, these two memes have come together, but it's not the first time memes and memes have been paired. Even corporate safety announcements understand that the power of old memes can be rejuvenated when getting a few of them together.

Incidentally, I'm not sure who a number of those internet memes are. In a way, the gathering of the memes is one way to ensure that each one of these temporally bound units of cultural capital retain some meaning. They are #StrongerTogether.

[Top image: "This is fine" incorporates elements from "Large bonfire" by Wikipedia user Fir0002, used and shared under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2. Graham content used in accordance with this disclaimer.]