De Leon: On our extreme love for memes

RECENTLY, a former Australian client and a friend of mine who visited the Philippines for a stint messaged me, saying: “I’ve been seeing this “joneeel” meme on Facebook lately. Where did this originate from? I’m a very out of the loop person ha ha! Thanks, mate!” he said.

“Well, Jonel is an alleged lover of that lady senator who was incarcerated. That video clip is from a congress hearing about the public official’s case and the weird thing is that the congressmen were more interested with the love affairs and rumored video scandal,” I replied.

“That’s really weird,” the Aussie man quipped.

Filipinos can really find humour in everything - from something as big as a billboard in Edsa to something as trivial as a random YouTube video. Our humour combined with being the social media capital of the world means that there are hundreds of memes to scroll through every day.

Every Filipino is on Facebook. It doesn’t even matter whether you’re scrolling through your iPhone X or your friendly neighborhood Pisonet. We took this brand of humour’s weight of context to heart and insanely elevated it.

Maybe, we really told ourselves that if the internet world is going weird, we’re going weirder with a banana catsup on top.

Memes can speak of us a lot about our country’s blatant alcoholism, how we’ve satirized administration after administration, and even how much everyone appreciates Vice Ganda and Bitoy for being themselves.

Everything’s shareable and downright hilarious, even in the most twisted way. But still, how did this become our brand of humor?

Obviously, not everyone’s okay in a way, not everyone supports our President, we’re still battling starvation, and hardly moving around the nation sober.

This is a challenge (never call it a problem) most of us face right now. What makes our approach with this brand of humour inimitable, apart from our own take on context, is our culture of laughing our problems away.

We are the type that quotes the phrase “laughter is the best medicine,” way too much. We are the type to laugh as we slip. And man, are we slipping hard these days?

Have we descended to madness? Yes, no and maybe. If another stock photo meme will provide us the ‘might to go on,’ then so be it.

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Need more tips in life, career and beyond? Invite me to speak in your event or reach me at “Coach Pat de Leon” on Facebook.

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