In this listener submission, Jack describes the "urinal etiquette" meme, educating us not only on the cultural context of urinal etiquette memes on the web, but also giving us a taste of some high-level internet scholarship in the form of meme subtext.
Jack:
All right. There are four horizontal frames, one on top of the other, in a cartoon like illustration style. In all of them you're looking straight at a bunch of cartoon urinals. Top frame, there are 12 urinals, and you see one guy standing in front of the second one from the left with his back to you, presumably doing his business. Second frame, new guy enters the picture from the right side, he's mid-stride three urinals into the image. Third frame, new guy is now at the urinal directly next to first guy, so the third urinal from the left, and also now presumably doing his business. Final frame, you're now zoomed out and can see 20 plus empty urinals in the bathroom, and the new guy is saying, "We've been trying to reach you about your vehicles extended warranty."
Jack:
So this tickled my funny bone because it's a scenario where you just think you're beyond safe from this kind of thing, and then a real person comes up and kills you by delivering a scam phone call in person. You're just like, yes, yes, this is exactly how annoying that one call I get is, and this meme captures that. This meme is just one example showing that it's hard to classify memes. The image is often referred to online as the urinal etiquette meme, and you see it with all kinds of texts applied to it. But the text is also well known as the we've been trying to reach you meme, and I've seen it attached to so many images, like as the message inside a bottle that washed up on a deserted beach, or as the fortune inside a fortune cookie.
Jack:
So what is a meme? It seems it can be an image, or text, or a specific pairing of image and text, or a GIF, or a video, or a screenshot of a social media post. It's kind of a fluid concept. There are lots of layers to memes we can talk about, and I'll just mention one more thing here. Sometimes meme artists can inadvertently reveal something about themselves through a meme. For example, there is a version of the urinal etiquette meme that's three frames instead of four, and so you've got the first frame with a guy peeing, second frame, new guy walks in, and the third and final frame shows new guy standing behind first guy, so close it seems like they're touching, and he says something that we're supposed to infer is kind of lame. I've seen one where it just says, "I'm vegan." So it's riffing on that joke, how do you know if someone's vegan? They tell you.
Jack:
All right, so it's funny, because in this meme, the vegan guy is just being really aggressive about saying that he's vegan. We know the artist probably views veganism with some disdain, or at least amusement. But to me, when I see this meme, there is a subtext. In my head I hear a bro saying, "Vegans are so gay, man," because now this meme sort of looks like two guys having sex in an empty bathroom. And actually, if you look closely at the one I'm looking at, you realize the first guy's pants are now fully down. Since the guys are right behind one another, you actually can't tell which one the text is attributed to. So maybe the text is the first guy explaining why he's the "kind of person who'd be interested in doing this."
Jack:
So I infer that the meme artist is a homophobe, even though the purpose of the meme is to poke fun at vegans. Memes are like a real-time mirror on society, and as a result, many are problematic, but I actually think that that makes them even more interesting to unpack. And I could still have a laugh at vegans, although vegans are great, we should all be more like them. And PS, one more thing I'll add, I thought I'd talk about the urinal etiquette meme, in part because I'm not sure whether all blind people, or people who don't use men's bathrooms, necessarily realize this, but there is a kind of unspoken etiquette that most men will only use urinals that are spaced apart from each other. And while I was looking up this meme, I came across a bunch of other funny ones about breaches of that norm, where one guy is forced to go between two other men, and it's uncomfortable, or something like that. And to be clear, it's not because they're homophobic, it's just that they have a certain reasonable expectation of privacy in that situation.
Jack:
Anyway, Love you Will, talk to you soon, bye.
Speaker 2:
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