"I think things on r/hmmm or r/mildlyinteresting are funny because the world we live in is filled with SO many creative people doing and making weird interesting things," Jamie Cohen, a digital media culture expert who studies memes academically, told us. Having the honor of being the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper on Pepe the Frog, one of the most prolific images on the net, Cohen has made studying internet literacy his life's work.
Internet humor, as we know it, is an always-changing 'microorganism' that can be many different things the next day you visit it (remember what happened with Pepe the Frog?). "We tend to forget that nearly everything is already somewhat absurd, but in context, we tend to not see it. Memes are decadent tiny bits of culture that help us make sense of the world around us in creative ways," Cohen said.
Although the r/hmmm content you see on this list is rough diamonds waiting to be made into memes, they share the same DNA, thus making it one of the most easily shared forms of humor. "The best way for a meme to work is to have it be applicable to a wide array of situations, and needs to be able to transcend its original context," Downer told. "Oftentimes you'll see people clamoring over a "new meme" that is really just jokes about one pop culture reference."
He cites sports memes as a particularly interesting example, because of their expiration date. Take 'Crying Jordan', for example. Not only it transcended Jordan and sports itself, but it became one of the most widely used memes to this day. Which isn't the case for most sport-related ideas. "Are they a 'working meme?' Oftentimes no, because it's gone from the timeline by the time the next game happens."
