British humor can be difficult to quantify and qualify. The more exposed to it you become, the more you start to truly ‘get’ all the nuanced layers of irony and banter. However, broadly speaking, British comedy has a strong tradition of satire, absurdity, sarcasm, self-deprecation, puns, and insults.
And if you follow any popular British comedians like Jimmy Carr or Ricky Gervais, then you know that taboo topics don’t stay taboo for long. Controversial? Naturally. Hilarious to the point that you’re wheezing? It happens more often than you’d expect.
Comedy is a nuanced subject as a whole. It’s a balancing act. On the one hand, you have to know your audience, respect them, and cater to their tastes and whims. You wouldn’t tell dark jokes to a room full of family-friendly pun-lovers. Nor would you tell dad jokes to a cynical auditorium that’s heard it all and needs a bit of spice to get them to chuckle.
Though you shouldn’t be ‘punching down’ in your stand-up routines, you also won’t get many laughs by being too nice or safe. Humor is about the unexpected. The surprising. The ironic. It’s about showing the contrast between our expectations and reality. Arguably, nothing should be sacred. And censorship is the enemy.
Often, the best jokes come at the cost of (gently) insulting oneself, someone else, or social norms. That’s the price of entry! But you can’t play it fast and loose with superficial, dumb humor. The jokes actually have to be witty, otherwise, you’re in hot water if you’re edgy for the sake of cheap shock value.
To classify Great British Memes as a phenomenon would be to do it a slight disservice. It is a digital force of nature. The odds are that its featured content has graced your social media feeds at least once. They’re just that widespread. And they are incredibly consistent with their posting, so there's always some fresh content to look forward to.
Created by founder George Bacon all the way back in 2017, the project is the foundational part of the well-known GBM Group social creative agency.
Great British Memes mainly focuses on spreading entertaining, humorous, and engaging content on the web. It has been wildly successful over the years! And it continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
On Instagram alone, the project has a whopping 2.7 million followers. A further 1.1 million internet users follow the project’s Facebook account while 1.9 million folks follow its TikTok page.
"Great British Memes was founded in 2017, and has now become one of many pages that GBM owns. Great British Memes was a project I started whilst at uni, and began to kick off straight away!" Bacon, the founder of both Great British Memes and GBM Group, told Bored Panda during a previous interview back in 2023.
