Whether you're taking a break between classes or simply want to remember the good old days, it’s interesting to see what 'Educational Memes' come up with. After all, nearly anyone who has ever stepped foot in a classroom has a few memories to share and can relate easily to these jokes. Well, at least, there are over 678K followers on Facebook who can. Ever since the page was created, it has become one of the go-to places for students worldwide to receive their daily dose of comic relief.
We managed to get in touch with the creator of 'Educational Memes', Yashdeep Kanhai, who was kind enough to tell us more about his entertaining corner on the internet. The founder told Bored Panda he is a law student who used to work with 'Dank Meme LLC'. "[I] managed several meme pages back in 2017-2019 with a collective audience of 10M, I have also been a moderator of the subreddit r/DankMemes," he revealed.
Yashdeep started this page on 12th May 2017. "I was very passionate about memes, during that time there were no meme pages related to education," he said and added that he used to make countless jokes out of the things he studied. That’s when he got the idea to start this project, and he never looked back.
Initially, the community on Facebook was very active from 2017 to 2019, and many devoted fans used to send in submissions all the time. But come 2020, Yashdeep noticed a slow and steady decline in engagement on the platform. However, he revealed that the account he created on Instagram is still alive and well.
Back when Yashdeep started the page, he had plenty of time on his hands, "so I didn't have difficulty managing the account." But ever since he enrolled as a student at a university, he rarely manages to find the time to post as much as he did before.
Still, thousands of students enjoy looking at the funny pictures and jokes he posts. The creator of the page guessed that the reason behind this is simple: memes are relatable. "[They] distract them from their busy academic life. They share it with their friends and have a laugh," he told us.
Yashdeep agreed that memes can help people unwind from their troubles and can even help fight their daily struggles. "Life gets depressing and boring every now and then, and what's better than to jump on the bed, take out your phone and look at memes after a busy day," he said.
Speaking of jokes, the fact that looking at a few funny images a day can significantly improve our mood and general wellbeing is nothing new. Humor boosts our heart rate, supports our immune system, and even produces endorphins, our natural painkillers.
"We know that laughter has been shown in studies to improve your pain threshold, likely due to an endorphin-mediated opiate effect. What is interesting is that this appears to be independent of your mood, meaning that it can have a positive effect even when you are down," Robert Bonakdar, director of pain management at the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine, told Verywell Mind.
Aside from the physical reactions, laughter also has plenty of psychological and social benefits, like improving our memory and letting us form long-lasting and meaningful relationships with other people. In an earlier interview, Joshua Klapow, Ph.D., psychologist and creator of MentalDrive, told Bored Panda that every single one of us needs humor in our lives.
He explained that laughter is the polar opposite of the stress, distress, frustration, and fatigue we can often feel during the day. "An intermittent dose of humor that results in a mood shift, even temporarily, can reset us emotionally and give us more emotional strength to carry on in our work," he added.
According to Klapow, memes and jokes serve two purposes. "They often connect us in a humorous way to the not so humorous situations we may find ourselves in at work. They are a way of both acknowledging the difficulties we may be having … and pointing out the absurdity of them in a funny way."
He added that they can also "validate our frustrations and irritations but at the same time put them into perspective by lowering the negative emotional intensity. In this way, they can at times help us to communicate our frustrations or desire for change."
Humor as we know it has been part of our behavioral repertoire for thousands of years. While we often think that memes are a relatively new phenomenon in this field, Bradley E. Wiggins, Ph.D., an associate professor of Media Communications at Webster Vienna Private University, previously told us they have been around for longer than people think.
"Memes have consistently been a part of online parlance, something academics refer to as 'digital culture', for nearly 20 or more years," he told Bored Panda. "The difference in awareness is due to the proliferation of a massive amount of content created, consumed and shared widely nearly all the time especially since cellular networks have increased the capacity for bandwidth."