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According to the internet meme database Know Your Meme, 2017 seems to be the origin of the "absolute unit" meme. A Twitter user who went by the handle @mrreptoid posted a picture of a British hotelier David Morgan-Hewitt posing with the Queen of England. He captioned the photo, "In awe at the size of this lad. Absolute unit." The tweet and its caption caught on and people all over the internet started using it on pictures of amusingly large objects.
The online community in question has amassed more than 1.1M members since it was created in 2018. One of the most important rules there is to simply be nice, "there's no reason to be an unfriendly unit." Moreover, moderators let the users know that toxic behavior of any kind is banned, and there should be no harassment, creep-shots, witch-hunts, or fat-shaming. As they write, "We're looking for animals mostly, particularly cute animals which happen to be very large."
To find out what an expert had to say about the meme universe and the "absolute unit" joke, we reached out to Bradley E. Wiggins, Ph.D., an associate professor and department head of Media Communications at Webster Vienna Private University. He is the author of The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture and his research interests also include digital semiotics and strategic communication.
"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."
The professor mentioned that one of the earliest internet memes — "unlike the concept discussed by Richard Dawkins in his oft-cited but mostly misunderstood book The Selfish Gene in 1978 — is the Star Wars Kid, originally a video that was shared and then later remixed and shared via early P2P services."
So Wiggins explained that memes have been around for longer than people think, "but their apparent increase in popularity stems from the truncated form of communication they allow. In other words, memes help you to keep it simple and short, but not without a possibly huge impact in terms of humor, but most interestingly because of resonance with an issue, a person or group, etc. at a given point in time," he added.
"It bears noting that when Trump was elected president in 2016, online supporters posted on 4chan that 'we've elected a meme as president', or something like that. That idea of a person inhabiting meme-ness (whatever that means) isn't that new. And one of the reasons why the absolute unit spread is due to the participation of Elon Musk in the meme's spread and remix, in my professional opinion."
It has commonly been assumed that memes usually have to cite or refer to some aspect of popular culture to resonate with a person or a bigger mass of people. "This isn't always the case and depending on the situation, the meme itself can swiftly become the same popular culture aspect that is making itself more understood and by more people," he said and asked you to think about memes that remix a politician as a villain from a movie or TV series. "That's a clear reference to pop culture."
"Now consider how a meme like the Ever Given cargo ship happened often without any reference to pop culture. Yet online users can remix the meme to talk about daily struggles, anxiety, jokes about failure, etc., and the larger online 'community' can ingest the meme as long as is needed," Wiggins told Bored Panda.
However, humor is still an essential part. "But sometimes the humor that is included might not be humorous for a different group than is intended for the original meme."
When it comes to the "absolute unit" meme, the professor noted it’s a relatively neutral category whose main component would be light humor. "It's therefore pretty attractive, you can remix it pretty easily by applying the absolute unit phrase to any image, for example, that shows an exaggerated proportion and this then serves as the joke." However, there is a catch.
"Being comically oversized also implies the potential for body-shaming, or sometimes called fat-shaming. It might also point to other physical attributes that the person affected has little or no agency over. However, it's very important to remember that in the history of humor in general, sometimes a bit of pain is necessary for the joke to succeed."
Wiggins asked you to think of the basic joke about some guy whose hair is thinning. "It is as common a joke as anything similar, but for the person with thinning hair or a bald head, the joke might sting. This is an important catch to memes especially as their rapid dissemination might tempt the people enjoying the meme to ignore this aspect completely all for the joy of the joke," he said.
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After all, we turn to the meme world to relax, unwind, and sometimes to make sense of our chaotic existence. But seeing how unique and bizarre some jokes on the internet can get, it may suggest our sense of humor might only be getting weirder. Sharing and creating memes "has a lot of possible motivations with regard to the person or group active in this process," Wiggins noted.
"Humor is a part of it but perhaps also [a] connection with someone or some group by means of commenting upon or sharing the meme, or even creating their own. If the humor is getting weirder, then it's time to take a long cold look at whatever one understands to mean 'society'," he concluded.
