Sometimes bullying IS funny, actually
In a surprising twist of events, Twitter finally had a nice two-or-so weeks of communal joy. To no one’s surprise, though the merriment was brought to us by other peoples’ suffering. Kind of.
Three topics in particular became the source for mostly good natured ribbing. The most complex narrative provoking discussion came from the many speculations and rumors surrounding the Don’t Worry Darling film production. Hints of misogyny laced some hot-takes on the subject, but not so much that one couldn’t overlook the problematic undertones to enjoy some pure petty celebrity gossip. Why do Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh seem to hate each other? Did Wilde start hooking up with Harry Styles when she was still with Jason Sudeikis? Did Styles get caught in 4k spitting on the lap of American treasure Christopher Pine? So many mysteries, each one more scandalous than the last.
For Don’t Worry Darling, the drama is spread pretty evenly across the reputations of various public figures. Shia LaBeouf, Olivia Wilde, Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, and Jason Sudeikis have all taken some heat for their rumored actions, on or off the film’s set (Sudeikis wasn’t even involved in the movie and still wandered his way into the controversy surrounding it). The other two stories that have entertained Twitter since the start of September, though, have more direct “victims” at their center.
One such victim is Queen Elizabeth II who died earlier this week at 96 years old. Jokes celebrating the Queen’s death flooded Twitter alongside pointed critiques of the royal family and the general concept of a monarchy. While some were quick to call criticisms and memes about Liz distasteful, or even cruel, it’s hard to say anyone’s been harmed by social media’s recent fun in the wake of this new historical event. The UK’s royal family has lived a life of unimaginable privilege and power. Their mere existence is tax-funded despite not providing a service for their public with any measurable, positive impact. “Celebrating” Elizabeth’s death is kind of silly as her passing will not alter the platform of Britain’s monarchy, but it offers those with considerably less influence than the royals an opportunity to laugh at their small misfortune (again, the woman lived to 96; her surviving decades longer than the average human being is hardly a tragedy, even for her biggest supporters).
Our third source of entertainment has earned its meme-spreaders a good scorning from someone that frequently seems to misread the landscape of Internet humor.
This story involves a social media-led “theory” asserting that the former Glee star, Lea Michele, cannot read. The joke has been around since 2017 but swells in popularity every time Michele makes headlines–say, for instance, when she was accused of abhorrent behavior after a 2020 #BlackLivesMatter-supporting tweet prompted a social re-litigation of her conduct on the set of Glee. Memes mocking Michele’s reading abilities, or lack thereof, arose again when she was cast as the lead in Funny Girl’s Broadway revival. Michele has been eyeing the role of Fanny Brice for years as a dedicated fan of actress Barbara Streisand. Unfortunately, Michele’s admiration for Streisand didn’t enlighten her to the dangers of the Streisand effect, the consequences of which she brought upon herself when she decided to actually address the rumors about her illiteracy, telling the New York Times, “I went to Glee every single day; I knew my lines every single day. And then there’s a rumor online that I can’t read or write? It’s sad. It really is. I think often if I were a man, a lot of this wouldn’t be the case.”
Unsurprisingly, Michele’s choice to not technically deny that she couldn’t read, as well as express offense at the suggestion of her illiteracy, did not slow down meme-production on the topic; it increased it.
Just when things seemed like they couldn’t get worse for Lea Michele, fellow actor Jameela Jamil stepped in to prove that they can, deciding to lambast social media users who found the jokes about Michele amusing. Jamil posted on Instagram:
Jamil is a well-intentioned soul whom I often find at the center of backlash she doesn’t deserve but nonetheless has brought upon herself by simply being bad at the Internet. Her recent post about the rumors surrounding Michele reminds me of another time a traditional celebrity (“traditional” being of the non-Internet, “influencer” kind) weighed in on a popular meme–that being when comedian Kumail Nanjiani lectured the Internet on the racism he perceived in the Harambe meme. Nanjiani tweeted in 2016, “Harambe became a big meme thing because it’s a ‘funny African name’ that people can make fun of without feeling racist.”
Both Nanjiani and Jamil brought up problematic aspects surrounding the popular memes motivating their respective statements. Illiteracy is an under-acknowledged issue in Western society born from circumstances of poverty, disability, and inadequate access to education. Some of those laughing at the claim Lea Michele can’t read likely are getting amusement from the idea that illiteracy is something worth shaming people for. It should first be noted, however, that Lea Michele did not grow up in poverty or without access to education, nor does she appear to suffer from a learning disability severe enough that a standard public school would have been fully ineffective in teaching her basic reading skills. Given her privilege, if Michele couldn’t read, that inability would be born from her own choices, not her circumstances. Even still, the joke is not based in any humor related to Michele’s supposed failure to learn. The joke is simply in the absurdity, barely connected to the topic of privilege or literacy whatsoever.
As much as I hate breaking a good bit, I unfortunately must acknowledge that Lea Michele can read. Obviously she can. The “theory” that she can’t–never a serious speculation, clearly a farce–claims that her career as a child actress kept her too busy to learn. Her star-power convinced others to read her lines to her, which she would then recite from memory. Her and a small group of co-conspirators have been covering up the truth ever since.
This is a ridiculous narrative, of course. No matter how much potential Michele had as a kid, adults in the entertainment industry are not known to be so patient with underage talent that a child star could ever develop a career like Michele’s without being able to read their own scripts. Nobody has the time or the budget to make sure Lea Michele has a written-word translator on set at every moment. Producers might as well shill out the cash for a tutor to teach little Lea to read and be done with it. Let’s also remember that many of Lea Michele’s previous co-stars fucking hate her. If any one of them caught on to her ruse during the years in which they were her co-workers, stories of her illiteracy would be more ubiquitous than stories of her micro-aggressions.
The assertion that Michele can’t read is funny because it’s untrue. In order to believe it, you have to ignore basic common sense as well as multiple data points that prove she’s not illiterate (she’s literally published two books; though skeptics may point out, the second is a journal for readers to write in themselves). Finding a rare piece of evidence to support the theory then becomes an exciting addition to an inside joke of the extremely-online. Like asserting that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer or that Avril Lavigne is a clone, the fact that the theory is ridiculous is what’s funny.
Different subcultures on Twitter have their absurd little theories and inside jokes that only make sense when you understand the basis of the humor. To Kumail Nanjiani, it may have appeared that the Harambe memes were making use of a non-white American name in an attempt at comedy, and perhaps some of those spreading the joke did think Harambe was kinda funny-sounding; but for background, Harambe is the name of a gorilla who was killed by employees at the Cincinnati Zoo in 2016 after a three-year-old boy climbed into his habitat. The incident caused international outrage, with candlelight vigils for the gorillas and unimaginable harassment directed toward the zoo’s employees and the child’s parents.
As someone who lies in the muck of the Internet more than Nanjiani could possibly have the time to, I always saw the subsequent meme as a satirical commentary on how disproportional the initial reaction to Harambe’s death was. While most Americans turn a blind eye to the atrocities within the meat industry, suddenly one gorilla killed out of genuine concern for a human child was making everyone an animal rights activist. The “dicks out for Harambe” maxim which followed the backlash was a parodied representation for how small disputes can be sensationalized until dissenters to a situation start acting like actual cults. Like with Lea Michele’s alleged illiteracy, the joke relies on a foundation of absurdity that only those intimately acquainted with the set-up can fully understand.
None of this is to say that every attempt at absurd humor on the Internet is okay. In 2018, Millie Bobby Brown deleted her Twitter account after Stan Twitter decided to flood the site with memes about Brown being a violent homophobe. For the record, she isn’t, but the meme fits into a joke format that’s been popular on Gay/Stan Twitter for years, in which a celebrity is alleged to have done something so on-the-nose horrible that a reasonable person couldn’t possibly believe it’s true. In Brown’s case, that was a habit of running queer people over in her car. For others, like Demi Lovato, it’s sending fans DMs that say “delete it, fat.”
The fact that there was precedent for the joke didn’t make it alright. When Twitter users are targeting Demi Lovato, at least they’re targeting an adult and one who wanders into conversations that don’t involve them about as often as Jameela Jamil. Lovato, to some degree, should expect sections of the Internet to enjoy starting baseless rumors about her. At least the ones that make it into memes are too ridiculous to believe. Brown, however, was a literal child in 2018 who’s done nothing but develop her acting career and mind her business. Strangers on the Internet were actually cruel to make an innocent girl the center of a joke she likely didn’t have the context to understand.
Millie Bobby Brown was right to be upset, and to some degree, Lea Michele isn’t wrong to be annoyed with the jokes about her either. Her attribution of the memes to her gender is a bit off-the-mark, but can we expect someone who’s not extremely online to take rumors about their reading abilities as anything other than malicious?
Still, for Jameela Jamil to label all those who find humor in the memes a “prick” and “elitist, ableist bore,” signifies the divide between the public figures who become the subject of Internet discourse and the extremely-online who participate in the conversations that make public figures sad.
Twitter users are often unsympathetic to the humanity of their joke’s targets and that’s something most of us acknowledge. The Internet is cruel, everybody knows it. But the public figures observing Internet humor as if it’s necessarily a tool to perpetuate bigotry is also unsympathetic. Sometimes we are not being making fun of people for problematic reasons. Sometimes we just enjoy saying things that are ridiculous and seeing how far they can spread.
Memes are, above all, an inside joke amongst folks who will otherwise never interact–a community bonding exercise that only looks so strange to people who aren’t a part of the community.
So the next time someone like Jameela Jamil or Kumail Nanjiani wants to call hoards of strangers ableist or racist for participating in a joke they don’t understand, how about y’all just count your millions in your mansions instead and let the rest of us have our parties in the muck without judgement.