There’s a humor that comes from the combination Online Cigarettes Store USA of Michael Jordan and crying. This is kind of in the weeds, but what makes stuff funny often comes down to something called incongruity. If there is a disconnect between the expectation and the reality, in a way that’s not completely shocking but a little jarring, a lot of times that’s why we think something’s funny. ‘Appropriate incongruity’ is that theory.
So what you have with the Crying Jordan meme is you have a really masculine, really iconic celebrity; also a figure who’s pretty Newport Pleasure stoic, and known to not be overtly emotional. If anything, he’s got a reputation for being kind of a jerk, right? But then you have this incongruity of him red-eyed, in tears, like really, really crying. And so if you’re a sports fan, and you’re a basketball fan, you say, ‘Oh, that’s kind of off.’ That helps the image resonate.
And that’s what’s beautiful about memes. In the original context, you have the subject – you have Michael Jordan – crying not in a way that expresses any kind of sadness. But when you move an image from one context to another, you don’t need him to be sad anymore. You just need the visual marker of this person crying. And then all of a sudden those tears can be applied in other ways. So it’s versatile, in that way. It’s ambiguous. You can use it beyond its original context.
TIM BURKE (Deadspin): And there’s a broader discussion Newport 100s Box to be made about this concept that modern humor is context-less, and that people react to things because they recognize that they’re funny, not because they get the joke. And – I mean, there’s a lot of shows that are super context- or subtext-sensitive that are extremely popular despite the audience, I’m quite sure, not actually getting the root of the joke. Family Guy’s kind of a good example of that. So you can have a lot of memes that are popular for that reason.
