Bleemer and Gorpman Are Dead

Someone made the observation — I don’t remember who, but it’s not original to me — that meme culture gives us a glimpse into the befuddlement archaeologists and antiquarians must have felt when they first encountered hieroglyphs.

Consider how bewildering it is to encounter a meme for the first time, deeply embedded in some obscure Twitter fight, without any idea of its origin or connotations. For example, I had seen the still of an excited man in a hotdog costume one thousand times before I even realized it came from a sketch-show bit, and a thousand more times before I bothered to YouTube the bit in question.