Tumblr Humor At Its Finest, Part Two

In a previous blog post, I talked about the warped sense of humor that Tumblr users have. In this post I continue my investigation of Tumblr humor and what exactly people who use this social network find funny.

One thing that must be considered is Tumblr’s main audience. According to Business Insider, Tumblr “is strong with teens and young adults interested in self-expression” with 46% of its audience between the ages of 16 and 24. The type of humor generated thus caters to people who are currently in or just left the awkward stage of adolescence and are merging into adulthood.

The post above brings to light a dark past that I myself have experienced. Our generation began to embrace social media around seventh and eighth grade, a time that nearly everyone remembers as awkward. I remember sending many texts that proclaimed how random I was, and I also used the “xD” emoticon much more than should have been allowed.

Tumblr’s demographic also collectively remembers the same cartoons, movies, and music from their younger days. A few posts became popular in part because everyone knows the characters from the cartoon which got its start in the 90’s, Spongebob Squarepants.

Both “stepping on the beach” and the-groundskeeper’s caption “what i did in graphic design class today is” refer to popular Spongebob episodes. The picture itself imitates an older meme which takes The Perks of Being a Wallflower’s quote, “And in that moment, I swear we were infinite” and applies it to ridiculous situations like this one.

This next post kind of terrifies me.

By itself, the picture is pretty funny. The character of Spongebob is oddly distorted and the accompanying text is nonsensical. But Tumblr, as usual, takes it further with these pieces of artwork by moopdrea and pentecost, respectively.

These rather terrifying additions turn a funny post into a hysterical one.

Tumblr users are also fans of defying expectations…

…being somewhat rude…

…and using puns wherever humanly possible.

Of course my favorite types of Tumblr humor are the completely odd and unexpected posts that just kind of jolt you.

The staff of Tumblr understands its demographic and the type of humor its users have. So every once in a while, they get in on the fun as well. The following pictures are all a part of one post.

 

My Favorite 2014 Tumblr Memes

It’s been a great year for memes in 2014.

I absolutely love Internet memes. From rickrolling to doge, the fact that a widely distributed group of people can laugh about the same thing and find endlessly unique ways to change it to enhance the humor demonstrates a type of communication and creativity that humanity has never really experienced before.

Tumblr has its own unique meme culture which often leaks to other platforms like Twitter and Reddit. Usually there’s one original post which people find funny or unexpected. The concept in this post is then twisted, changed, or combined with other memes to make it even funnier.

A very recent example surfaced on Tumblr just this month: Goats craving minerals. Here’s the original post:

According to Business Insider, the post originally surfaced on Reddit, but the addition of sixpenceee’s caption made Tumblr go crazy. Soon, every Tumblr user was craving that mineral. These pages have more great examples of this meme. Of course, “they crave that mineral” is only one of the most recent Tumblr memes in 2014. Here’s a list of some of my favorites from this year, including links to where you can find more examples of them:

Selfie Olympics

The Selfie Olympics started to grow in popularity in December 2013 and became Internet popular in January 2014. Tumblr and Twitter accounts were created to showcase the best and most challenging selfies people had ever taken. A few notable examples:

This BuzzFeed article also has some examples of the best Selfie Olympic challengers of 2014.

It’s a Metaphor

John Green’s young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars was released as a movie in June 2014. One of the most memorable lines comes from the character Augustus Waters, who carries the same pack of cigarettes around but never lights one. In the teaser trailer of the movie, released in April 2014, Augustus tells another character, Hazel Grace, “It’s a metaphor, see. You put the thing that does the killing right between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you.”

This is the meme that resulted from the trailer:

More examples of popular “It’s a metaphor” posts can be found here and here.

Free Him

This meme started with a post by transboyscout. He posted a picture of a Pikachu bouncy ball with the caption, “Free him.”

The resulting meme:

Fortunately, the widespread campaign to free Pikachu was eventually successful, thanks to Tumblr user ruinedchildhood:

I came out to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now.

This meme seemed endless. According to Know Your Meme, it originated with a post by Tumblr user chardonnaymami in June:

Photo via Know Your Meme

However, some people thought it came from Nick Jonas, who supposedly tweeted the phrase soon after:

In any case, the meme became very widespread and kept reappearing over the course of the summer.

DashCon/The Ball Pit

In March 2013, a few Tumblr users decided that they wanted to create a fan convention specifically for Tumblr users. After Tumblr told them they couldn’t use the name “Tumbl-Con USA” (since it was not officially affiliated with Tumblr), the event was named “DashCon” after Tumblr’s dashboard. It was held July 11-13, 2014 in the Schaumburg Renaissance Convention Center in Illinois.

These are some great articles about the many failures of the event, but the main things that went wrong were that the hotel supposedly demanded $17,000 upfront to keep the convention running and the main speakers (Welcome to Night Vale) cancelled their appearance because they weren’t paid on time. In recompense for those who had bought tickets for Night Vale, DashCon personnel supposedly offered ticket holders “an extra hour in the ball pit” that was available at the convention:

The strangest part is that this offer was not meant as a joke. Those in charge of DashCon seriously offered patrons an extra hour in this tiny ball pit for the loss of their tickets. It was perhaps inevitable that the ball pit became its own meme.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be Tumblr if memes didn’t collide at every opportunity.

These are just a few of my favorite Tumblr memes from 2014. My Halloween post shows an example of a few memes from later in the year. Let me know what your favorite memes were in the comments!

Come Together: When Tumblr Collaboration Becomes Awesome

One of Tumblr’s main features is that any user can add to any post. They can add comments, sources, pictures, reaction GIFs, anything that will supplement the original post’s message, prove it wrong, make it funnier, etc.

A lot of the time, Tumblr users create art based off of a text post to add an element of visualization, such as in the following examples:

Tumblr user hauriret was inspired by nonbinaryeldritchhorror‘s post to create a piece of art and cited it as the stimulus for the artwork.

The vision of the original user came to life with a work of art done by a different Tumblr user. The same thing happened in the next post. Suncalf created the text post, and dorirosa added the art to go along with it, uploading it directly to the original post.

While some Tumblr collaborations result in amazing fanart, others add just the right touch of humor or wit to make the original post much funnier than it originally was.

One of the most well-known examples of adding to a Tumblr post to make it hilarious is Tumblr user perchu’s addition to the “Moreos” post. His addition to shslvalkyrie‘s post made him Tumblr-famous and he in essence became his own meme.

The original post can be found by clicking the screenshot below. It featured a fake advertisement for “Moreos,” which separates the cream and cookie segments of Oreo cookies and allows the consumer to combine them in whatever quantity they want. Perchu’s reaction to this idea is interesting to say the least.

Perchu’s intense use of profanity was part of what made his rant so hilarious. Completely overreacting to a post about Moreos made perchu extremely well-known on Tumblr, and to this day his username is tagged in multiple Oreo-related posts.

Finally, there have been some amazing audio posts created based off of text posts. On Tumblr these appear as audio files, but unfortunately I can’t transfer the audio files to WordPress. I’ve included links to Youtube videos which contain the full audio, and you can also click on the screenshots to see the original Tumblr posts.

This one makes me cry laughing. The original text post makes fun of the style of A-Ha’s song “Take On Me,” and the audio makes fun of the text’s posts interpretation of the style. It turns into a hilarious manipulation of the song.

This post is one of my favorite examples of Tumblr users’ creativity. It started with a simple yet brilliant manipulation of FUN’s “Some Nights.” Lovelyklaine changed the lyrics to make the song apply to Tumblr users, and merryblangstmas (now found at the username brickshack) took the one verse and created a Tumblr-themed version of the entire song.

 

The lyrics and merryblangstmas’ addition can be found here. If anyone ever asks you what Tumblr is about, this song is actually a pretty good description of the life of a Tumblr user.

Let me know if you have found any other examples of Tumblr collaborations!

Let’s Get Spoopy: Tumblr’s Weird Obsession with Halloween

It’s October 1st–which means it’s officially Halloween? That’s what Tumblr (and, admittedly, every single store that sells Halloween candy/decorations) seems to think. I’ve actually been seeing October/Halloween-related posts on my dash since the beginning of September, though, so the Halloween obsession gets pretty intense.

The arrival of October brings back well-loved memes such as the impending skeleton war, Halloween-related puns and various “spoopy” and “creppy” posts. This is a time of year when Tumblr users flaunt the many inside jokes they have which often confuse the rest of the Internet. You know, same old Tumblr.

The spoopy meme originated on Flickr, but the most popular post it’s associated with on Tumblr is this one:

Tumblr took that and ran with it. Countless posts exist about how “spoopy” and “creppy” Halloween is. For at least the two years that I’ve experienced Tumblr on Halloween, the spoopy tag has been used to identify people’s Halloween posts in all seriousness.

Another one of my favorite Tumblr memes is the impending skeleton war which will apparently begin after the apocalypse or just, you know, whenever. It’s always best to be prepared.

Finally, here’s a compilation of my favorite skeleton Halloween puns. These cartoons have been on my dash pretty much the entire summer and I literally never get tired of them. They’re all part of the same post and I even left one or two out due to foul language, so take a look at the complete post if you like. Happy October!!

Tumblr Humor At Its Finest, Part One

One of the main ways the users of Tumblr have affected my everyday life is by their warped sense of humor.

Sometimes, as I’m laughing hysterically at a Tumblr post, the people around me will ask, “What is it? I want to see!” With tears in my eyes I’ll turn my computer around to let them see the post. Often I’ll get a weak chuckle or a confused expression in response. I’ll try to explain the humorous aspect, but we all know trying to explain the joke makes it less funny. So thanks for putting me in so many awkward situations, Tumblr.

This post is the first of several dedicated to the many funny posts on Tumblr. Some of these everyone will laugh at. Some of them require background knowledge or knowledge of current events to get the joke. And some of them … I don’t even know, man.

Let’s start with something everyone can find funny, one of my favorite examples of Tumblr humor:

Here’s a great post that makes fun of the sentence structure. The commentators of this post choose to interpret the sentence as stating that the crayon will only burn for 30 minutes in an emergency situation. Naturally, one has to wonder what sort of emergency situations apply. I also personally love the aesthetic quality of a crayon on fire.

Now for some creative Tumblr humor. One of the most unique things about Tumblr is the way its users combine old and new media, a topic which will be explored in depth in a later post. This is one of my favorite examples, a combination of an older piece of literature with modern music.

I don’t even know what prompted the original poster to bring those two elements together. But in the Tumblr world, posts like this beg to be created. The second user actually took the time to sit down and puzzle out how Macklemore’s song “Thrift Shop” would be presented in the style of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” and they did it brilliantly. Not only is it hilarious, but it shows the intelligence and creativity of some Tumblr users.

Here’s one that pokes fun at some of the glitches of the new iPhone 6. Apparently it has a habit of bending when someone tries to keep it in a back–or even a front–pocket. So Tumblr had a little fun with that.

Okay, now we’ll get into the weird stuff. This is where I start to think my sense of humor has been permanently twisted by this website.

So here’s something interesting. All of the users who contributed to that post don’t exist at those URLs anymore. Maybe because their mere connection to this post means they were harassed with hundreds of questions about why it even exists. But really. Someone had this idea, managed to scrounge up several GameCubes (or maybe they just had a pile in their basement, I don’t know) and placed them among flowers. If I saw just the picture I would probably wonder what sort of recreational drugs the original poster was on, but the caption really makes this funny. Now I’m picturing a bunch of GameCubes frolicking in a field.

Maybe it’s the pun. Maybe it’s the absurdity of a dog sitting in a news studio. Maybe it’s his blunt reply and the clear indication that this dog has been through puns like this before and will not tolerate this sort of unprofessionalism any longer. Whatever it is, this post gets me every time.

Finally, I think this post sums up Tumblr’s sense of humor quite nicely. Often no caption is required to get the humor across, and this Tumblr user evidently did not feel the need to include one. But everyone once in a while, some person scrolling through their dashboard will come across a post like this and begin to contemplate what exactly led them to this website, to the moment in their existence when they must be subjected to this sort of awful humor.

In this situation, I think the profanity is entirely justified.