Dark humour (no pun intended)

Have you ever heard one of your friends or family say the word 'Meme'?. It's still a relatively new form of humour which has thrived over the internet. There are sites dedicated to the sharing and making of memes, and people can spend hours just browsing these sites. Being a relatively new term it is quite hard to find a set defintion. However, these are the ones I found that seems to best help understand what a meme is if you've never seen one: 

Merriam Webster Dictionary - An idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person                                                      within a culture

Dictionary.com - A cultural item that is transmitted by repetition and replication in a manner                                           analogous to the biological transmission of genes.

                            A cultural item in the form of an image, video, phrase, etc., that is spread via the                                  Internet and often altered in a creative or humorous way.

To be honest, I don't fully understand the word myself. It's complicated because its seems to work off a shared understanding of those sharing the meme. Therefore, if I don't share that same knowledge or same understanding then does it count as a meme to me. The commonality I find with memes is their simplification and reappropriation of what it aims to 'transmit' or 'spread'. They tend to take or change the actual meaning of the image for the purpose of humour in most cases. Not all memes are about racism but I wish to talk about those that do work off of racist stereotypes. Memes can be a way of essentializing that which is being depicted. In terms of people, it can take stereotypes about those people and turn it into an ongoing joke. Laughing at the absurdities of stereotypes in stand-up comedy is not new, but memes present a new form of comedy which crosses that line of progressive to regressive very easily and without much consequence to those doing it. You don't really know who started it (comic source) or who it is aimed at (audience), but we definitely know who we're meant to be laughing at. 

Yeah, it is easy for some to brush memes off as "just a joke" but the reproduction and sharing of these stereotypes have real repercussions for those of who the meme is about. Take the two memes above as examples. One makes fun of the stereotype that black males do not stick around for their kids, the other makes fun of the stereotype that white country folks enjoy incest. These are very racist simplifications of what black males and white country people are like. Memes work in a way that Sabrina Pearson defines as polysemic bimodality. Memes have progressive elements in its casual sense that "it's just a joke"and we all can laugh at ourselves once in a while. However, there are definitely negative consequences of such memes as above being spread and shared. If you don't think that such images can be harmful, then take a look at our worlds history. The last notable time I can think of that such images like memes were being mass produced was the production of Nazi propaganda. Such images of Jews were common throughout Nazi Germany and worked to demean and hurt Jews. 

I do realise that Nazi propaganda is an extreme form of such humour but it represents how such images can become very damaging and have real world consequences. I do find myself laughing at some racist memes occasionally. For some reason, me and apparently a lot of other people have become desensitised to racism. I just hope that the dark humour found in racist memes don't become  'just a joke'....with no joke intended.