By Ed Zhao ’12

Photo Courtesy of Eddie Anduar ’15, Conner Christiansen ’15 and Andrew Burnett ’15

Spongebob Squarepants character Patrick Star motions to the left, a sense of urgency in his eyes. He is addressing a concerned crowd of Bikini Bottom residents and holds their rapt attention: many of his listeners have their mouths agape while their beady eyes follow Patrick intently. The caption above reads, “Let’s take all the weird artsy kids.” Then Patrick motions to the right, and the next caption states, “And put them at the bottom of the hill.”

The scene is from a Facebook page that comment on the quirks of Lafayette College. It’s all part of a recent explosion of college memes and it’s fairly easy to explain their popularity. They humorously underscore unique traits concerning our universities while functioning as a gigantic inside joke. The Lafayette page, created by Libby Lucy ‘15 on February 8 of this year, already boasts some 70 memes and 268 members, as of press time.

“I started the Laf Memes Facebook page after I saw in my news feed that one of my close friends had just joined her college’s meme group,” Lucy explains. “I went to the page, looked at some of [them] and decided that Laf had a lot of good meme material.”

Adding to the popularity of these images is the ease of creation. Students simply draw on the vast store of images already ingrained within interwebs culture and then they add their own insightful captions. The humor can stem from the plausibility of truth behind these words or sometimes it’s the disconnect between image and caption. One such college freshman meme reads, “Bro, I’m so ready to rage. Goes to the Spot.”

Many of these memes do require a rudimentary grasp of the associated picture. Success kid is fairly straightforward as it depicts a child celebrating an event, such as finding an empty Skillman workstation on Sunday night. Others, like First World Problems, require some context. These depict a woman in tears as she overreacts to a dilemma that only privileged countries would face. One such Lafayette example is “Gets to Simon at 5:50. Line already back to Rubin.”

In tracing the history of this phenomenon, the first such page was by Florida International University of Miami on October 1, 2011. It lamented their football team’s inability to catch touchdowns and such pages quickly gained popularity. The concept spread to various colleges in the following months and now many of our news feeds are inundated with memes that are incomprehensible to outsiders.

But for those who are part of the college, these memes are usually received with a chuckle. Matt Green ‘12 adds, “It’s interesting because it’s something only Lafayette students understand. It’s really just for us.”