Meme Essay

I've analyzed Epic Fails for everyone's viewing. In the essay I identify a whole array of Epic Fail types, including the meme's most likely origins. It is still a growing and mutating meme, and it can be found in all sorts of places online. I have included some of my favorites, so if you like what you see, check out my meme analysis and maybe sites like Failblog.org and Epicfail.com. News Anchor Fail Compilations on Youtube are pretty incredible too!

Keep bloggin'
Jeremy

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Jeremy Lerner

Digital Rhetoric

Meme Analysis

Rough Draft

February 13, 2012

Epic Fails Online

            The meme I am examining is the phrase “Epic Fail” as it appears on standard websites, blogs, Youtube channels, and through social sharing. This includes photos, galleries, postings, videos, GIFs, compilations, and others that incorporate the phrase into their tags, titles, or descriptions. The content of this meme is expansive and varied, with the common theme of humorous human error. The part of the audience is to enjoy the humor at the failures’ expense. This meme is successful in its many forms because, like many memes, it does not depend strictly on nuances of language, and the substance of its content is virtually limitless, making it more or less universal in its appeal to a huge internet audience.

The origins of Epic Fail are not impossible to trace, though they are difficult to pinpoint exactly. Slate has found message boards saying, “You fail it,” with eventually shortened “FAIL” and “EPIC FAIL” comments, tracing their roots to a poor Japanese to English video game translation that ultimately achieved cult status online. Similar references date to 2003 on Urban Dictionary and the Doomworld website, where the message boards also refer to subtitles in early Japanese/American console games. These original incarnations communicated directly to an English speaking audience familiar with the foreign game title. More specifically, it catered directly to those who also frequented message boards as well.

The meme has since undergone countless mutations and permutations. Knowyourmeme.com has identified 2006 as the start of the Epic Fail Guy, a stick figure series of images from the image site 4chan, a “character who is bound to fail at everything” (Know Your Meme). The Fail Guy meme can be consumed by reading the texts, captions, titles or subtitles, and speech bubbles, and by quickly analyzing the crudely drawn figures to find the humorous failure. This communicates to a bigger audience because the content is less specialized; it is mostly image based, and the forum is image sharing as opposed to more obscure message boarding. As such, the Fail meme succeeded in incorporating more people into the growing joke.

Another mutation can be found by looking at Fail specific websites. A boost of wide public awareness of the meme spread it into less self-contained groups, and spawned the creation of sites like Failblog.org, Epicfail.com, Todaysbigfail.com, and others. These sites feature regularly updated content, much user submitted, of any kind of humorous error in photo or short video form, such as car crashes, bad tattoos, poorly answered trivia questions, injury as a result of hubris, and others. The content is essentially limitless, as long as the photo or short video clip obviously refers to the error within it. What has changed is the incorporation into the meme’s content of live action shots, photos from peoples’ personal collections, and real injuries documented. Again, the audience can grow and include more people with these changing formats. Before long, these sorts of videos were easy to find and upload on video streaming sites like Youtube, and the output of photos not just on Fail specific sites, but all over the internet, became bigger and faster.

Since Fails achieved meme status online, one mutation that exists on much of these sites includes the creation of Wins. Essentially the opposite of Fail, a Win can be a close call, an impressive ability, or something else with a similarly positive result. Wins can be featured on sites dedicated to Fails, dedicated to Wins, on Youtube, Imgur, or through other forums on which one can share information. Like Fails, they too can be photos, GIFs, or videos, and they communicate a similar message to a similarly web based audience.

Another way the Epic Fail has mutated online includes the creation of genre-specific Fail compilations. News Anchor Fails, Sports Fails, Cute Animal Fails, Car Fails, and more all exist. They also exist in huge, regularly updated numbers. Many are codified by date, making them easy to search for and find. They can be edited into complete compilation shows with music and effects as well, making them easily consumable and highly entertaining. These are catered towards people who, like those who frequent Fail specific websites, are dedicated to enjoying the Fail meme in large numbers, not necessarily as a one-off find in passing. Since they can last more than ten minutes of constant Fail in video form, they have proven to be captivating and popular to the online user, racking millions of hits.

It can be seen that since its original inception in the early 2000s, the Epic Fail meme has grown and changed in many ways effecting its terminology, form, audience, and subsequent memes. For my remix segment, I will post an original photo gallery of Fails I have found separate and isolated online. By compiling them in my own format and reposting the collection on my own blog, I will be working within the parameters of the meme while still changing it slightly. As such, I will be contributing to the growth of the meme in a unique and original way.