I’m up on memes and down with the kids

Boy and I have been driving the Fawn mad by singing the ‘Johny Johny Yes Papa’ song. It goes (roughly to the tune Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star): ‘Johny Johny/ Yes, Papa/ Eating Sugar?/ No, Papa/ Telling Lies?/ No, Papa/ Open Your Mouth!/ Ha Ha Ha.’ In the likely event that you don’t know it, you’ll probably find it as irritating as the Fawn does — especially the misspelling of Johnny and the bad Indian accent. But in the unlikely event that you do, you’ll be congratulating yourself on your pop cultural credibility. This is because for a brief period peaking around last weekend — ‘Johny Johny Yes Papa’ was the world’s most fashionable meme.

Even if you’re not exactly sure what a meme is, you’ll be familiar with a few. Downfall — aka ‘Hitler reacts to’ — has become a stalwart of the genre. The scene (lifted from the 2004 movie starring Bruno Ganz) shows Hitler in his bunker gradually losing his rag as his nervous generals break the news on how badly the war is going. The subtitles to the German soundtrack have been endlessly recast to explore amusing anachronistically topical themes. More than 1,000 variants have appeared since its first usage in 2006, including one earlier this year where Hitler discovers Germany has been knocked out of the World Cup in the early stages, and another — pop will eat itself — in which Hitler is outraged to learn that there are numerous Downfall parody videos.

Another meme you’ll surely have glimpsed on social media is the one known as ‘Distracted boyfriend’. Taken from a stock image database, it shows a man admiring the rear of a passing woman while his girlfriend looks at him in obvious disgust. Again, through the use of captions — a throwback, almost, to those 19th-century cartoons where, say, a bear is labelled Russia and a lion Britain — the opportunities for political and social commentary are limitless.

Its first known appearance in captioned form was in a Turkish Facebook group in January last year where the man is labelled ‘Phil Collins’, the newfound object of his admiration as ‘Pop’ and the appalled girlfriend as ‘Prog’.