Case Study 21.2: The Meme as Courtship Signal

A New Form of Humor in Courtship

The meme is among the genuinely new elements of twenty-first-century courtship — an image macro, video clip, or audio fragment that circulates across networked platforms carrying layered meaning that is immediately legible to those who know the reference and entirely opaque to those who do not. The decision to send a meme to someone you are romantically interested in is, on the surface, a small thing. Examined more carefully, it is a surprisingly rich communicative act.

What a Meme Communicates

A meme sent in a courtship context carries several simultaneous messages:

Cultural knowledge: The sender knows this meme exists, which locates them in a particular internet subculture, generational cohort, or interest community. Knowing the meme implies exposure to whatever ecosystem produced it — gaming culture, a particular Twitter community, a fanbase, a political sphere, a professional subculture. This is a disclosure of identity and context.

Taste: Of all the memes the sender could have selected, they chose this one. The choice signals what they find funny — their comedic register, their emotional relationship to the subject matter, their willingness to be ironic, dark, absurd, or silly.

Attentiveness: The best meme courtship moves are contextually apt — sent in response to something specific in the conversation. "This is the perfect meme for what you just said" requires that the sender was listening and that they have a large enough repertoire to match the moment. This is a form of responsiveness that mimics the contextual attunement of good conversational humor.

Intimacy stage marker: Certain meme categories are only appropriate at particular intimacy stages. Memes that are deeply ironic, extremely absurd, or highly niche require shared context to land; sending them prematurely — before the relationship has established enough common ground — will cause them to misfire, like an in-joke without the history.

The Compatibility Function

The humor-compatibility research predicts that meme exchange will function best when both parties are operating in overlapping meme ecosystems — when they have been exposed to the same or adjacent internet cultures. This is why meme courtship has a filtering function: the meme you send tests whether the other person shares your reference points. A Vine-era meme reference, a deeply specific fandom joke, a meme that only circulates in software engineering Twitter — these are not just funny attempts, they are compatibility probes. The response tells you whether you are navigating the same territory.

When a meme lands perfectly — when the other person responds with immediate recognition, genuine amusement, and possibly a counter-meme that escalates — the exchange accomplishes something close to what good banter accomplishes: mutual delight in shared understanding. When it doesn't land, the failure is informative. It reveals a cultural gap that may or may not matter for the relationship.

Cultural Specificity and Risk

Meme cultures are extraordinarily fragmented. A meme that is ubiquitous in one online community is invisible in another; a meme that was funny in 2018 is cringe in 2023; a meme that functions as gentle irony in one cultural community is unacceptably offensive in another. The cultural specificity of memes is much higher than the cultural specificity of most face-to-face humor, because memes are produced in and circulate through specific networked communities rather than through broader shared cultural experience.

This creates specific risks in cross-community courtship. A meme that originated in a context carrying political or social meaning may carry that meaning to the recipient even if the sender is unaware of it. Internet culture is not politically neutral, and meme ecosystems are often deeply associated with specific social and political communities. Sending a meme without full awareness of its genealogy is possible, and sometimes the meme means something to the recipient that the sender did not intend.

The Authenticity Question

The chapter notes a finding by Sharabi and Caughlin (2017) that humor in online contexts is most effective when it appears contextual and responsive rather than scripted. This applies with particular force to memes. A meme that is clearly the same meme sent to everyone (the "copy-paste courtship move") fails as a humor signal precisely because it is not responsive — it does not show that the sender was attending to this specific person. The meme that works as courtship is the meme that could only have been sent to this person, at this moment, in response to this specific thing they said.

This is, in a sense, a re-encoding of the fitness indicator hypothesis in digital terms: the signal value of the meme is in its contextual aptness, which demonstrates attentiveness and social intelligence, not just the fact that the sender knows the meme exists.

Discussion Questions

1. How does meme-sending as courtship compare to the chapter's description of face-to-face humor in terms of spontaneity, compatibility-signaling, and the Duchenne laugh? What does meme courtship lack compared to in-person humor?

2. The case study describes memes as "compatibility probes." What does this mean, and how does it connect to the chapter's broader discussion of humor compatibility versus humor ability?

3. What are the ethical risks of meme-based courtship communication? How might the cultural genealogy of a meme create unintended messages?

4. Design a brief study that could test whether meme compatibility (sharing the same meme ecosystems) predicts romantic compatibility better than, say, music taste or shared hobbies. What would you measure? What methodological challenges would you face?