Tom Hanks Beats the **** out of Coronavirus and Timothée Chalamet Is a Hand Sanitizer. Memes on Pandemic From Around the World
News headlines of recent weeks are all about the COVID-19. The general concern is understandable: the virus is spreading rapidly, there is no vaccine against it, the borders are being closed, and the physical world is going online. In these difficult times, humor helps to cope with anxiety. Most of the world is now quarantined in self-isolation and dying of boredom — and these are the ideal conditions for the birth of new memes. We collected the most funny ones for you.
At first glance, it might seem that making new memes is a pretty pointless thing to do. But researcher Clay Shirky, who studies the influence of the Internet on society, justifies this work and calls it cognitive surplus — since we do it at the expense of free brain cells.
Cognitive surplus is a part of our intellectual, energy and time resources that we do not have time to use in everyday life. Therefore, we throw these forces into filling our social media, edit Wikipedia, remove TikToks and construct coubs and memes.
It is clear that in self-isolation we get more “cognitive surplus”. Therefore, the number of memes on the Internet has grown.
In different countries people make memes about the virus in different ways. Usually, local jokes are understood only by locals. In the city of San Angelo (Texas, USA), for example, people joke about the local water — supposedly it is so dirty that it can kill any virus!
Another popular meme in America is Corona beer (formerly the third most popular beer in the country), which has already been called the “coronavirus beer”. Negative associations played a cruel joke with the brand — beer sales fell sharply.
In Spain, there are jokes that locals treat all diseases with wine and ibuprofen.
A lot of memes are about the people who hunt for toilet paper (most of the users cannot understand why).
But most of the memes now are about social distancing. In many European countries people are literally locked in quarantine at home. Twitter users talk about their experiences under the hashtag #QuarantineLife.
Those who started working remotely from home due to quarantine have to video call colleagues, complete work tasks, and at the same time share the apartment space with their families.
Someone, however, is used to sitting at home.
Well, if you still decide to go outside, then that’s the only way.
If Timothée Chalamet was a hand sanitizer.
And everyone is very worried about Tom Hanks, who tested positive for coronavirus with his wife Rita on the set in Australia.
Cover image: portiswasp1 / Instagram
