Born Under A Bad Sign

As Mark Twain states in his novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, "When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.” Perhaps no one person knows this more than Bad Luck Brian. 

Ouch. 

This classic meme was born in the depths of reddit in January of 2012, featuring a middle schooler named Kyle Craven, dressed in a hideous sweater and smiling goofily for the camera. It quickly exploded in popularity, and has since become one of the most widely-known and  humorous Internet memes. The focus of this meme is Brian's truly awful luck; but is there such a thing as bad luck in real life? 

Sources say: maybe. It's true that some people really do have a lot of bad things happen to them simply by circumstance. However, those "bad things" are also influenced by one's choices, competence, the actions of others, and random chance. People tend to blend all of those factors together, attributing misfortune to superstition, or plain bad luck. Logically speaking, we should be able to determine why bad things happen to people by looking at their choices and actions, which may result in negative outcomes because of behavior. But our minds aren't wired to work that way; we believe in bad luck even when it's not there. 

Our brain is designed to find patterns in the massive quantities of information it receives; letters, numbers, sounds, and so forth. This is of course a crucial skill for human survival, but it also tends to make us spot patterns in that jumble of data that don't really exist. Essentially, our brain makes conspiracy theorists out of us all; we attribute random events to luck rather than mathematical probability and science. 

For example, people who believe that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day will attribute everything that goes wrong that day to bad luck, and will also have more things go wrong because they have preconceived expectations that can turn a minor incident- tripping over a curb- into falling into traffic and spilling hot coffee all over yourself, just because you think it's going to happen. With bad luck, we're basically the engineers of our own destruction. 

This perception of bad luck also has ramifications for how people view their own lives. This attribution of misfortune to bad luck is called psychological reversal, a subconscious method of sabotaging one's success.If we believe we suffer from bad luck, we're more likely to view events in a negative light than a positive one. Where one person might see getting locked out of their dorm room as an opportunity to walk around and explore campus, someone else (including me) could see it as another example of how nothing in their life ever goes right, woe is me, blah blah blah. Bad luck is entirely subjective; what's good for one person is terrible for the next.  As I said above, we find a good think and make it into a bad thing then blame it on the odds, all while ignoring the actual mathematical odds (or our own stupidity) that led to things going to hell. 

So if you ever find yourself blaming bad times on bad luck, just remember: it's all in your head. Don't spend the day cursing the Blue Loop for leaving you behind; instead, enjoy the walk to class and take in some of the scenery that Penn State has to offer. 

We are...

Go On, Tell Me More...

Ah, sarcasm. The crown jewel, in my expert opinion, of all humor; it requires both deep thought and thoughtlessness, and the right mix of bite and humor to either generate some laughs or leave your audience staring vacantly in confusion. It can range from barely-concealed contempt to witty banter with friends, though as with everything else on this blog, there's a reason for why we do it.

Denizens of the Internet will have seen this one before; the late Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, gazing off to the side as snarky text belittles some seemingly foolish proclamation. To those of us who see sarcasm as an art form, this meme's hilarity is endless. And to those who just don't get it, well...I'm sure you're just on a higher plane of humor than me. (Kidding, of course, but I needed to work in a sarcastic example somehow.) But seriously, everyone enjoys some well-placed comic relief, but psychological studies suggest our snark comes from more than just the desire to be funny.

Surprisingly (or maybe not, depending on how you feel about the targets of your quips), sarcasm can stem from feelings of inferiority compared to our peers. If we feel like one of our friends has bragged a bit too much about their fantastic test grade, we throw in a "Wow, you must be so smart," to knock them down a peg. Beyond the fact that nobody likes a braggart, people needle each other to establish dominance and intellectually superiority; we've made a clever joke and boosted our egos a bit at the same time. Even on a biological level, sarcasm is related to aggression and dominance, with being "top dog", for both the jokester and those who respond.  People who consistently had higher levels of aggression, and not necessarily in the physical sense, were shown to be more sarcastic in general.

However, contrary to popular belief, sarcasm isn't related to intelligence. Although your friends might belittle you if a witty jab flies right over your head, the perception and understanding of sarcasm is linked more to social and emotional receptiveness. Sarcasm isn't just in the words we use; it's our facial expressions, gestures, and the all-important, make-or-break tone of voice. Studies show that those who understand sarcasm the best are highly socially intelligent, able to read body language and vocal inflection more easily, which doesn't necessarily translate to academic intelligence.

Aside from determining whose banter is the wittiest, sarcasm also has important ramifications regarding our relationships with each other. People being sarcastic often see themselves as being innocently funny, but those on the receiving end may not feel the same way, instead experiencing hurt and a loss of self esteem over a supposedly harmless barb. I remember a conversation I had with a friend of my friend last week, as she commented on the copious amounts of people populating Penn State's campus.

"It's just so crowded here," she said, shaking her head in dismay.

Me being me, I elected to respond with a deadpan remark: "I know, right? It's a good thing we've got the plague going around; it's starting to feel a bit overpopulated around here, y'know?"

Suffice to say, she looked at me like I was a genocidal maniac for the rest of our conversation. I had unwittingly fallen into one of the traps of sarcasm: not knowing your audience. Our friends, for example, our used to our facetious ways, but total strangers are much more likely to take you literally, which can lead to disaster when you bring out a snarky comment.

To put everything into perspective, sarcasm is a basic social response to either a desire for humor or feelings of inadequacy, two very different concepts pooled under the same witty umbrella. So next time one of your friends makes a snide comment at you, you can spend the whole day thinking about what exactly they meant by it.

(Again, kidding. Isn't sarcasm great?)

How it feels at Penn State sometimes. 

Can I Have A Frame For This Meme?

This is Pepe. 

Credit: Fran Zi/YouTube.com 

Originally a character in cartoonist Matt Furie's comic strip, the saddened frog gained a permanent home on imageboard site 4chan before exploding into mainstream popularity in 2015, receiving the honor of being the most used meme on Tumblr that year. Since then, Pepe has enjoyed a quietly steady existence among the denizens of the Internet. That is, until this past Tuesday. 

This past Tuesday, Hillary Clinton's campaign posted a lengthy explanatory article about Pepe, who aside from being a meme has become something of the unofficial mascot for both the Alt-Right movement (a "mainstream" alternative to conservatism) and Donald Trump's campaign. This was in response to an image mocking Clinton's naming of Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables", with Pepe being featured in a mock movie poster alongside key Trump supporters. Quickly seizing an opportunity, Clinton's campaign explained to its meme-savvy supporters how Pepe is actually a symbol of white nationalism, and used it to tie Trump to the often racist and xenophobic Alt-Right trolls lurking in the dark corners of the Internet. However, since this isn't a political blog, I won't be discussing political ideology or whether Clinton's campaign was even correct in its explanation, but rather the social and psychological ramifications of Pepe's exploitation. 

Interestingly enough, using an image or symbol for some sort of gain isn't a new phenomenon; people do it every day without even realizing it. This is called framing; presenting something in a certain way to generate a specific cognitive response in people. For example, let's say I offer you a deal: I'll give you psychic powers that'll allow to predict the outcome of all Penn State football games. Naturally, you'd take it; the benefits of such abilities would be enormously rewarding for you. However, let's say i come to you a week later and tell you that your psychic powers could've been used to prevent a catastrophic war, and instead you wasted them on football ; now you feel like terrible person. What I've done was present the matter in a new frame, from positive to negative, without changing the original wording of our bargain. Is it deceptive? Sure. But it works. 

As you may already know, our perception of reality is subjective; it's not absolute, but based on our emotions, thoughts, and experiences, and how we frame things determines the value of those experiences. We can choose to look back at a day we got drenched by rain on the way to class, for example, with burning hatred or fond amusement. In fact, framing is actually a survival mechanism; it allows our brain to make order in a world full of chaos, its primary function. Essentially, our brain frames the one straight line in a jumble of curves and criss-crosses. Though I won't get too deep into it, framing also creates meaning out of nothing; why do we remember specific events vividly and other dimly? Because something, our emotions, our thoughts, made us look at that event in a way that gave it importance. 

What the Clinton campaign did with Pepe is an example of political framing, which is about as old as politics itself. The way people feel about issues is based on how politicians frame them; for example, abortion seems much more palatable as "a medical procedure" rather than "baby killing." Is a drug epidemic a "law and order" problem or a "medical" problem? Asking someone "How do you feel about Obama?" versus "How do you feel about that dirty Democrat Barry O?" obviously triggers a certain response because of the wording, one reason why all those polls the news loves to show often aren't very scientific. And yes, even the news media is guilty of "spinning" issues to suit a certain narrative; just look at how differently Fox News and MSNBC cover the same story. 

Alas, framing is an essential, often unnoticed fact of life. As much as we want to avoid being "played" according to our biases, we're hardwired to respond based on how we feel, and let cold hard objectivity take a back seat. You'll see framing no matter where you look, even, it seems, in the meme of a cartoon frog. 

Sources: 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight-therapy/201012/framing-your-most-important-and-least-recognized-daily-ment

Harambe: The Meme That Won't Die (Even If Its Subject Already Did)

Unless you've been living under an Internet-free rock for the past three months, memes regarding the slain gorilla Harambe have likely flooded your various social media accounts. The meme itself is fairly standard as far as Internet humor goes: frequently crude, always irreverent, and fueled by the hurt feelings of those who legitimately cared about the gorilla being mocked by everyone else who just wanted a quick laugh. But the truly remarkable thing about the meme is this: it won't go away. Months have gone by since Harambe was shot and killed, yet jokes and humorous image edits continue to pile up. And what's even more fascinating? There's actually a psychological reason for why that is.

The eponymous gorilla. Image courtesy of Reuters. 

First, a little background for those lucky few who might've missed the whole incident. On May 28, a three-year-old boy climbed into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and was grabbed and dragged around by Harambe, a 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla. To prevent the kid from getting hurt, a zoo worker shot and killed Harambe. The whole event was captured on camera, and received international media coverage over the controversial decision to kill the gorilla. Scores of people were outraged, blaming the child's mother, the zoo worker, and the whole zoo industry for killing the gorilla. Scores of other people, however, quickly to took to social media to mock Harambe's supporters for their anger while the world was plagued with real, pressing concerns. And that, my friends, is where the memes began. 

Unlike last year's killing of Cecil the Lion, for example, legetimate animal rights activists were quickly drowned out by rampant memes from all corners of the Internet. Song lyrics, image edits, and mash-ups with other memes are just some of the examples of Harambe's post-mortem fame, which has only continued to rise as the weeks have gone by. Keep in mind, most memes don't last too long, typically being eclipsed by the next new one at a rate of about one a month; that makes the proliferation of the Harambe meme that much more curious. Even the Cincinatti Zoo fell victim to the memes, deleting its Twiiter account following the issuing of a formal statement condemning those pesky Harambe memers. Leave it to the Internet to chase America's second-oldest zoo away with memes. 

But despite appearances, the Harambe meme is actually a great example of the textbook definition for "meme". According to Richard Dawkins, the British biologist who first coined the term, a meme is a behavior, idea, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. The desire among people to replicate and spread the meme to others is called imitation. Essentially, Harambe has been given significance by our popular culture, and the social desire for people to be included in that culture is what drives them to replicate and disseminate the meme. Looking around campus, it's easy to see this is true; any whiteboard on the door to a dorm room is fair game to have "dicks out for Harambe" (one of the many branches of the original meme) scrawled all over it, and even mentioning "Harambe" in conversation will generate an immediate and familiar response.  

The psychology behind the process is relatively simple: people want to feel included, and the very nature of memes allows a common ground to form between them through a shared, often humorous, idea. In Harambe's case, the outcry over his death was replaced by mockery of said outcry, which transformed into ironic mourning for his death that is collectively seen as humorous. The irony surrounding the meme has been its primary staying power, which has been further fueled by the massive exposure the meme has gotten following Harambe's death. The more the media talks about how "out of control" the meme has gotten, the more people want to hop on the bandwagon and be a part of a societal trend. Now that a societal idea has been transmitted through mass media, it's become virtually unstoppable, a juggernaut of a dearly departed gorilla taken from us far too soon. (See what I did there? Meme.) 

Even the fact that some may consider the meme hurtful has done nothing to slow the Harambe train. This is due to a sort of "relief effect" of the joke: it's okay to joke about a gorilla being shot because he was, when you get right down to it, just a gorilla. However, it's not considered socially acceptable to joke about, say, 9/11. Why? Because real people were really affected, rather than a crop of butthurt animal activists quickly rendered irrelevant by a meme of their own outrage. Harambe memes are society's way of joking about typically untouchable topics, an expression of humor that's usually kept bottled up for the sake of propriety. Collectively, we've all unscrewed the pressure valve to let all that bottled up morbid humor escape, with Harambe as our glorious mechanism. 

Personally speaking, I find the meme to be hilarious, and for exactly the reasons I gave above. Harambe makes a funny, socially acceptable punchline to just about anything, and it's rendered more humorous by how rampant it is across campus. Even knowing that I'm spreading the meme because of human social behavior has done nothing to make me stop wanting to spread it. 

So, here's to you, Harambe old boy. May you find the eternal glory in memeified death that you never got in life. 

Photo: SelectALL/Cincinatti Zoo/Getty Images

Sources: 

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/07/harambe-forever.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/us/the-complicated-appeal-of-the-harambe-meme.html