The “Gossip Girl” Meme That Carried Us Through Quarantine
The worldwide quarantine caused by the Coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 was the perfect recipe for a viral meme: millions of Millennials and “Gen Z-ers,” sitting at home all day, stuck on their phones with nothing much else to do. It was no time at all before Twitter user “baro_tokiyo” created a meme based on the 2007 TV series Gossip Girl, with the caption, “This is testing what little sanity I have left.” The meme depicts the protagonists of Gossip Girl, Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf, having a short interchange in which Serena says “i have to pee” and Blair responds with “go piss girl.” To fully understand the hilarity of the meme, one has to understand that Blair’s response, “go piss girl,” is remixed from the show’s title, Gossip Girl.
Rhetorical Appeals
Logically, this meme makes little to no sense without any prior knowledge. This is emblematic of the internet at the time of quarantine — anything with mere crumbs of humor or opportunity for engagement was boosted across platforms due to the sheer boredom of social media users. This feeling relates to its emotional appeal. As the internet united in the feeling of life being on lockdown, memes like this felt like an inside joke amongst many friends — a joke where you know it’s ridiculous, and makes almost no sense, but is all the more funny because only you and your friends understand why. Thus, the meme required no presence of an “authority” or ethos appeal to become popular, as so many people were responding to it at once that it swept the algorithms. This is not a new characteristic to social media — people don’t need someone telling them why a meme is funny or why they should remix one, as long as the meme does that for itself.
Iterability
The original creator of the meme wasn’t wrong by saying that this meme is a test of one’s sanity. It takes an eye for creativity and a certain amount of desperation for humor to make a meme like this go viral — the images have almost nothing to do with the humor of the meme (a convention found in many other viral memes), and in fact it almost fully relies on the obscurity of the phrase one can create out of the show’s lettering. This feature created iterability, which according to James Porter’s “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” is the “‘repeatability’ of certain textual fragments,” (Porter, 35) for others to make their own ridiculous interchanges between the two characters, and people came up with new renditions constantly. Some remixes focused on current events, such as one of Serena saying “i’ve been practicing social distancing” and Blair saying “go girl.” This aspect increased the relevancy of the meme, allowing it to be something that could distract folks from the current events of the time or make light of the situation.
The iterability of the meme doesn’t just apply to the renditions with two pieces of text. Some versions of the meme rely solely on the photos, or almost incoherent speech, to make the joke, breaking free from the linguistic mode of communication and relying more on the visual aspects (these modes are defined in Melanie Gagich’s “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing.”) These versions most easily reveal the absolute lack of sanity held by people on the internet during early quarantine — some of them are so obscure and devoid of sanity that they could have only been made in this time. In these, the reliance on visual understanding over linguistic makes the energy of the meme more chaotic and random, and as the meme was remixed consistently these became more popular. The original meme, which presents a real concept based on the name of the show, eventually spiraled into ones almost completely lacking in logic. The real joy in these is to simply absorb them visually and understand the joke, so not much explicit analysis of the memes pictured to the left is necessary.
Rhetorical Velocity
In terms of the meme’s ecology within media, it began on Twitter, rapidly making its way onto other social media platforms such as Instagram, where highly remixable memes such as this one can become popularized instantly. A familiar experience for the internet, the meme settled comfortably into the discourse community (a community of people with similar goals, methods of communicating, genres, and language) of social media users and digital natives, who frequent sites such as these. However, this meme took a path unexplored by many of its predecessors — it migrated discourse communities from social media to news outlets. Companies such as Buzzfeed, Harper’s Bazaar, and Cosmopolitan produced articles about its virality to its audience of Millennials and individuals now settled into adulthood, but who experienced the rise of the internet in their early adolescence. This meme was perfectly crafted to be able to do so; Gossip Girl was a show that made its debut in 2007, when the audience of these sites would have been the target audience of the show (a soapy, dramatic high school TV series). Thus, the meme holds presupposition in that it assumes that its audience will understand that the punchline of the meme is the rearrangement of the letters of “Gossip Girl.” This is most clearly evident in the original version of the meme, in which the punchline reads “go piss girl,” a direct rearrangement of “Gossip Girl” without any letters removed.
Social Impact
In the times of Coronavirus and consequential isolation, memes like these are necessary for many to function. Not only do memes have the power to provide distraction from real events (if only temporary), but they can also unite people through digital spaces when being together physically isn’t possible. Several media outlets have commented on the impact of this specific meme on society during Coronavirus, such as Buzzfeed, which comments in an article posted in April 2020: “There are just so many places to take it. It’s just so easily adaptable. Honestly, this is the exact kind of dumb fun we need right now. And also the sort of dumb fun that makes the internet so damn good. And in these strange times, we’ll take whatever we can get to stay sane” (Buzzfeed). The nature of this meme is truly a paradoxical one — it is truly lacking in sanity and rational thought, but provided just a little bit of sanity to anyone who interacted with it during the time of its creation.
Bibliography
Gagich, Melanie. “An Introduction to and and Strategies for Multimodal Composing.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. 2020. Web. Accessed 24 January 2020.
Melzer, Dan. “Understanding Discourse Communities.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. 2020. Web. Accessed 24 January 2020.
Porter, James E. “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.” Rhetoric Review. Autumn, 1986. Web. Accessed 24 January 2020.
Strapagiel, Lauren. “This New “Gossip Girl” Meme Is Exactly The Sort Of Dumb Humor That Will Get Us Through This Strange Time.” Buzzfeed. 14 April 2020. Web. Accessed 19 January 2021.