On May 23, 1991, the NBC first aired The Chinese Restaurant,the eleventh episode of a failing second season of Seinfeld. The episode sees the three characters Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Benes, and George Costanza waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant. Thats it. Thats the entire plot of the 23-minute episode. The audience watches in real-time as the characters simply wait.

The episode eventually ends with the characters leaving before getting a table because they no longer want to stand around. Today, its remembered as one of the greatest and most exemplary episodes of the radical, revolutionary 90s sitcom.

When the second season of Seinfeld aired, it was to disinterested spectators. Episodes were met with lukewarm audience responses, a bewildered network, and dwindling ratings. Unlike its contemporaries, Seinfeld pulled humour out of the most mundane of activities and interactions. It didnt make up elaborate conflicts or climaxes. Instead, it proudly garnered a tagline as The show about nothing. Seinfeld went on to air for another six seasons, generate an audience of 76 million, and rack up $3 billion in returns. Today, running gags like yada yada yada, master of his domain, and no soup for you, still thrive in the current 21st-centurycultural zeitgeist.

Outside mainstream popular culture, Seinfeld remains prophet to the surrealist memescape of 4chan and Reddit, having predicted the trends of recontextualising quips and subversion of genre, as well as a distinct departure from elitist forms of media and traditional storytelling. The show about nothing would go on to set the precedent for everything.

It goes without saying that popular culture is distributed and consumed in a very different fashion today versus the 1990s. Seinfeld seemed to initially trip-up at a time when sitcoms like Full House, Married With Children, and of course network frenemy, Friends, were situated in a landscape that was still riding the sitcom wave of the 70s; creating plots from the same rules of relatable and accessible post-war television, with familiar characters in familiar scenarios created for a casual weekly viewership.

Seinfeld, on the other hand, was a sitcom meant for a binging era. With characters continually smirking nods to past jokes, it rewarded viewers for sticking with the sinking ship. Creator Larry David had one golden rule for the Seinfeld writers: no hugging, no learning. It pushed boundaries, always keen to test audiences with controversial story arcs like trying to abstain from masturbation or the meta episode arc in the fourth season where Jerry and George pitch their lives as a sitcom on the NBC. It was a show for its cult following and it didnt try or want to appeal to the masses.

Platforms like TikTok, 4chan, and Reddit thrive off this same exclusive community consciousness and, like Seinfeld, it can be difficult to penetrate them from the outside. Think of the different sides of Tik Tok basically the idea that the algorithm funnels users into different subsets of TikTok content, and liking particular clips will see your timeline inundated with similar posts.

Once creators discovered this is how the app curated the For You page, they purposely played on this idea by creating an absurdist bean genre of TikTok (which was basically nonsensical 15-second edits of beans from a can), or the Jason Daniel Earles side of TikTok (which saw clips dedicated to the appreciation of the 43-year-old on-screen brother of Miley Cyrus in the since finished Disney Original series, Hannah Montana).

There was a thrill in seeing if you could make it into the niche community, and knowing that your contribution could mean that these nonsensical TikToks could make it onto an unassuming users timeline. Isolated and without context, these edits are not particularly witty. But when it exists within a cultural consciousness where everyone except those on the outside gets the joke, there is humour in its unapologetic absurdity.

It can be difficult to deconstruct the surrealist meme genre, much like how its difficult for an audience to resonate with an episode about waiting and leaving a Chinese restaurant. Both are aware of their irrelevance, and both soak in it.

The we live in a society meme emerges from these same themes of absurdity within a community connected by cultural consciousness. If you arent aware of this meme or have just come to accept you probably arent deep enough into the internet to get it dont worry, thats the entire point of its appeal. Like all absurdist memes, its born completely out of irony and subversion of the meme genre. Typically, the meme is connected to the Joker, either including the character himself or editing other people to look like the green-haired, red-lipped man.

So where doeswe live in a society meme come from? The earliest trace of its origins can be found on Hong Kong-based meme site 9gag in April 2015. This is in the form of an image macro of the Joker, accompanied by the caption: When the nice guy loses his patiance (sic) / the devil shivers.

This particular meme struck gold for a few reasons. Firstly, the whole nice guys finish lastgamer/incel superiority complex has long been a running joke in the commentary of 9gag. This meme captures it in just absolute peak irony: channelling the Joker to symbolise a higher than average IQ, and then misspelling patience. The joke wrote itself. As of a couple of months ago, the meme had garnered upwards of 38,600 points and 520 comments on 9gag, with much of the engagement boosted by ironic trolls, wanting to make sure this meme became the absolute epitome of the meme site.

The DC supervillain has long been connected to the gamer identity, a sort of figurehead for a whole online incel cyber world syndicate after the Dark Knight film came out in 2008. Online outcasts began to worship the Joker, believing they too embodied the misunderstood, highly intelligent social outcast driven to villainy by the amorality of society. In a world where its impossible to compete: the nice girls chase after hot guys and neckbeards are left without girlfriends.

So, in that way, the Joker became a sort of re-contextualisation, a way to armour themselves with their difference. These people were proud of their nonconformist identity. It showed they were wiser, more woke. To them, the way the world operated was backwards; it rewarded parasites and liars. And so, they used these online spaces to vaunt how corrupt humanity was and how, rather than society excluding them, it was they who refused to be a part of society.

As these cringe, wannabe-profound memes became increasingly popular on sites like 9gag, they began to be enjoyed as pieces of satire on edgier online spaces like 4chan, Reddit, and shitposting groups on Facebook. In the process, absurdist meme-makers began to pierce the elitist, counterfeit-intellect of the Joker symbolism, making their own memes with a sentence fragment that mocked the incel gamer ipseity, in what we now understand as the we live in a society meme. However, this meme has certainly diverged from its DC comic origins and now the phrase has evolved into internet shorthand for being faux woke with a profound lack of self-awareness.

While somewhat disputed, it is thought that the phrase we live in a society was chosen due to the aforementioned The Chinese Restaurant episode of Seinfeld, where George channels his own hyper-macho superiority complex to sanctimoniously discuss the injustices of the episodes payphone politics, and ultimately, the wrongs of the world. Seething, with clenched fists, he yells: Were living in a society!

Still angry, Costanza goes on a rant, not unlike the incel gamers on 9gag Does anyone ever display the slightest sensitivity to the problems of a fellow individual? No! only to immediately double back and change his tone when the stranger apologises for their extended use of the payphone. Immediately, George snaps out of this edge-lord fantasy and back into his wimpy character, no way being this macho man he made himself out to be.

While its arguable that this clip is just a coincidence and unrelated to the true origins of the we live in a society meme, it is certain that Seinfeld polished the tools of the trade that we see within the 4chan and Reddit memescapes. These memes, fuelled by irony and subversion of the form, are not dissimilar to how Seinfeld took the sitcom and made a joke out of it, forcing the audience to wait 23 minutes for a table to become available at a Chinese restaurant.

Seinfeld, much like absurdist memes, never tries to act like it has the answers or holds some greater meaning. In fact, Seinfeld actively opposed this sentiment. It never tries to be about more than whatever is happening to its characters at any given moment, just like the humble we live in a society meme.

If we can take away anything from this, its that only one thing is for certain. There is a societyand we live in it.

Link:

How Seinfeld predicted the we live in a society meme - Happy