Online humor is absurd and ironic because jokes are remixed by communities until only insiders get them. The word “meme” dates to 1976, but surreal, layered irony came later.
The habits behind this style are part of wider internet culture, where shared context matters more than any single punchline.
Where did absurd online humor come from?
The story starts in 1976, when Richard Dawkins introduced the term meme in his book The Selfish Gene to describe a conceptual unit of cultural transmission, analogous to a gene. Dawkins later described internet memes as a “hijacking of the original idea”, because people deliberately alter them instead of copying them blindly. That deliberate alteration is the engine of absurdity: every remix moves a joke one step away from its source.
Later, the researcher Limor Shifman solidified the relationship of memes to internet culture and reworked Dawkins’ concept for online contexts. A joke online is rarely a finished object. It is a template that any stranger can edit, which rewards the people who push it somewhere unexpected.
Early formats were comparatively plain. Lolcats, a style especially popular in the mid-and-late 2000s, began on the imageboard 4chan and became the prototype of the image macro, a picture overlaid with large text. Demotivators, photoshopped images and rage comics followed. Those formats were silly, but their meaning was mostly literal: a cat wanted a cheeseburger, and that was the joke.
How surreal memes layer irony
Newer genres, including dank and surrealist memes, rose with short-form video platforms such as Vine and TikTok. Wikipedia’s overview notes that surreal memes incorporate layers of irony to make them unique and nonsensical, often as a means of escapism from mainstream meme culture.
Two examples show the pattern. “They did surgery on a grape” is a video of a da Vinci Surgical System performing test surgery on a grape. The “moth meme” is a close-up picture of a moth with captions about the insect’s love of lamps. Neither contains a conventional punchline. The humor sits in the mismatch between a serious or mundane subject and an obsessive, deadpan treatment.
The grape clip is funny because a precision surgical robot is applied to a task with no stakes, and the viewer is invited to take it seriously. The moth meme works the other way around: a throwaway animal photo gets a dramatic emotional backstory. Both reward a viewer who recognizes the genre rather than the subject, and both are easy to imitate with a new object, which is how a single odd video grows into a family of variants.
Another Vine-era case is “What’s Nine Plus Ten?”, a clip of a child giving an incorrect answer to a math problem. After Vine shut down in 2017, TikTok became the de facto replacement with the same short format, so the style kept evolving there.
Why irony stacks up in layers
A joke that spreads widely gets stale quickly, so the next wave responds by joking about the joke. A sincere image macro becomes an ironic one, then an ironic take on that irony. Each layer filters the audience: people who recognize the earlier layer laugh, and newcomers feel left out. That filtering is part of the appeal.
The cycle can run quickly. A format that starts as an earnest caption on an imageboard can be mocked within days by posters who add a second, contradictory caption. A third group then jokes that the format is dead, and the dead format becomes funny again. Because every step keeps the original template recognizable while changing its attitude, the audience reads the joke through its whole history rather than through the final image alone. That is why a screenshot with no visible punchline can still make a regular of the right community laugh out loud.
Wikipedia’s description of the form is blunt about the result: once considered valuable cultural artifacts meant to endure, memes now often convey trivial rather than meaningful ideas. Triviality is not an accident here. Treating something meaningless with total commitment is itself the comedic move.
Communities also shape the layers. A thread on a forum or subreddit develops its own vocabulary, which is why the habits described in reddit culture produce running jokes that look arbitrary from outside. The same dynamic explains why a pasted block of text can become a joke on repetition alone, as the page on copypasta explains.
Anti-humor and the missing punchline
Absurd online jokes borrow from a much older tradition. Anti-humor, per Wikipedia, is based on the surprise of an expected joke or punch line being absent from a narration set up as a joke. It is described as a form of irony or reversal of expectations that may provoke an emotion opposite to humor, such as fear, pain, embarrassment, disgust, awkwardness, or discomfort.
Stand-up comedians offer precedents. Andy Kaufman paired quasi-surrealist acts with performance art, including his fictional persona Tony Clifton, an untalented lounge entertainer. Norm Macdonald was also sometimes associated with the style, although he objected to the characterization. Online, the same move appears as a caption that promises a story and delivers nothing, or a meme whose “joke” is that there is no joke.
Deep-fried memes and in-jokes as social signals
Deep-fried memes show how degradation can become the joke. Wikipedia defines them as memes distorted and run through several filters or layers of lossy compression, producing saturated colors and artifacts. The damage signals that a picture has been shared so often it is worn out, and that the sharer knows it.
Insider status is the other function. Wikipedia notes that internet memes can work as in-jokes within specific online communities, conveying insider knowledge that may be incomprehensible to outsiders, which fosters a sense of collective identity. A study by Miltner traced lolcats from an in-joke within computer and gaming communities on 4chan to a broader source of humor and emotional support. The same path, from private joke to public format, explains why absurd humor feels both exclusive and contagious.
Even the economics are joked about. The /r/MemeEconomy subreddit began with users jokingly “buying” or “selling” shares in a meme to reflect its potential popularity, turning the life cycle of a joke into a parody market.
Frequently asked questions
What is online humor?
Online humor is comedy built from shared, remixable formats such as image macros, short videos and in-jokes. The lolcat image macro of the mid-2000s is one early example, and surreal memes are a newer one.
Why is so much of it ironic?
Irony lets a joke comment on its own overuse. Wikipedia notes that surreal memes incorporate layers of irony as a means of escapism from mainstream meme culture.
What is a surreal meme?
A surreal meme is a nonsensical, deadpan joke such as “they did surgery on a grape”, a clip of a da Vinci Surgical System operating on fruit.
Is anti-humor the same as absurd humor?
They overlap but differ. Anti-humor, as Wikipedia defines it, relies on the absence of an expected punch line, while absurd humor can have a punch line that simply makes no sense.
