Memes: Modern Day Political Cartoons

For centuries, political cartoons have been used to engage in political discourse through a visual medium and convey messages that rhetoric can’t. In an era where political cartoons mostly appear in the dying vice of the newspaper, our eyes have switched over to the endless stream of the shocking, unfamiliar, and contextual style of political cartoons. Memes.

It’s no secret that we have to understand the political landscape of the time period in order to understand political memes much like current political cartoons. I want to express the relationship between these two visual styles, how they contrast one another, and how they present differing degrees of nuance.

One of my favorite memes from the 2016 election cycle was this tumblr-style Bernie Sanders meme.

Source: http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1076338-bae-come-over

Let’s look at the parallels, this has all the vital elements of a political cartoon. We have a large piece of central action that most political cartoons express, it conveys some piece of political commentary (Bernie’s proposed plan to make college accessible to all) and context (2016 election & the “bae come over” meme that it’s referencing). The most potent parallel however is how little their is to take in, the message of this meme is very obvious. Of course, this isn’t supposed to be some ground-breaking insight that most political cartoons strive for. In fact, its intended to be the opposite, light-hearted and humorous fun which is the draw of most memes.

Now let’s take a look at a more traditional political cartoon published by Adam Zyglis on "The Buffalo News".

Source: http://buffalonews.com/2017/11/09/adam-zyglis-thoughts-and-prayers/

Despite their similarities, traditional cartoons can express more nuanced meanings that memes just can’t convey due to the medium's limitations (are you seriously going to draw a picture to post a meme on Twitter, I didn’t think so). We can see heavy levels of personification/symbols in traditional cartoons more than memes (Uncle Sam symbolizing America, bullets representing grains of sand, etc.)

That’s great, why do I care or why am I still reading this garbage? Look, you can take away what you can, metaphorical reader. The point is, memes present an interesting and engaging medium in which to express political opinions. We have to carefully consider this as an acceptable medium to do so. Political cartoons try to carefully carry insightful political messages that engage conversations because that’s its purpose. Memes serve a similar but complementary focus, being able to give an insightful message that can be absorbed immediately because nobody is going to see it for more than 2 seconds on Twitter. It’s a different way of expressing the same positions and conversations through the constraints of its time-frame of viewership. We live in a world where the way we absorb content is different and cartoons are starting to reflect that. Once we accept that, maybe then we can have serious conversations about what they mean to the people that created them and what problems we face as a Internet culture.