How Joe Biden and Barack Obama memes cheered us all up after the US election

After Trumpageddon we all needed some cheering up — and the internet delivered, says Phoebe Luckhurst
Barack Obama and Joe Biden
Getty Images

Debate is in a new, unprecedented place. This week the OED announced that “post-truth” was the leitmotif of the year. The word denotes “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion”, and its emergence is directly linked to the frenzy around Donald Trump’s rise.

It has certainly been frenzied: hyperactive and high-pitched. But unfortunately, since Trump is charged on fear and hatred, lying prostrate outside Trump Tower beating your fists will not cow him but animate him.

No, those with wit and resilience have realised the most convincing counter-revolution against the orange bigot is the meme.

You’ll have seen some of the images, if not reams of them: pictures of Trump, Melania, Obama or Biden overscored with quippy captions that make light of the President-elect’s mystifying rise. Their goal was unified: to collapse our fear and loathing of the man by making him seem ridiculous.

So while it’s important not to overplay it — memes also don’t strictly have any practical application, and won’t shift Trump — this week they did distract us from the self-important doom-mongers. Which has to count for something.

“I’ve always been one to respond to distress with jokes,” explains Mollie Goodfellow, a journalist at Sky News and one of the first people to start adding imaged scripts to images of President Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden, which became the prevailing meme of the week. “I’m very fond of ‘dark humour’ and this year it’s sorely needed. Some people replied to the Biden tweets, saying, ‘I’ve laughed for the first time in days!’ after Trump was elected.

“The tweets were embedded into articles. People created Instagram accounts and I got emails saying ‘thank you’ for the funny tweets. A few TV stations have asked to speak to me about them too, which seems weird as they’re just little jokes.”

Indeed, the Biden and Obama series has made headlines internationally. After eight years in the White House there are plenty of pictures of the pair in the Oval Office and walking together in the grounds of the White House. Astute Twitter users such as Goodfellow used them to imagine the last days of the Biden-Obama administration: Obama cast as the weary realist, Biden as the upstart rabble-rouser.

In one, Biden holds an American football, staring intensely at Obama. “... So when he walks in, you shout ‘Donald, duck’. Obama interrupts: “No, Joe”. In another, the words transposed over a picture of Obama looking crestfallen read, “Barack: Who’d you vote for?” Joe: I wrote in Harambe”.

A picture of Biden staring out of the White House window has been picked up — a popular caption, conjuring Obama’s cautioning tone, reads, “You can have your slingshot when they’re off the property”.

A Twitter account, @bidenandobama, that collates some of the memes, had almost 30k followers less than a week after it was opened. “Biden and Obama seemed to have a great friendship,” Goodfellow observes, “which really comes across in photos. They lend themselves well to being captioned.”

Riots break out after Donald Trump US wins Presidential Election

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But while most of them are unapologetically, joyfully silly, a few touch on something more serious. For example, one image shows Obama and Biden clasping hands. The caption imagines a conversation between President and his Vice-President: “Joe, why are you still holding my hand?” “I wanna freak Mike Pence out.” “But why?” “Just roll with it.” Pence — Trump’s Vice-President-elect — is a voluble opponent of LGBTQ rights: he has called being gay a choice and said preventing gay people from marrying was “God’s choice”. In 2007, he opposed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which opposed discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and in 2010 he opposed repealing the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell directive in the US military, telling CNN he didn’t want the military to be “backdrop for social experimentation”.

This is where memes actually have a (semi) function: topical satire. Sure, Swift and Orwell were doing theirs with essays and novels while this patchwork 21st-century version involves stitching together pictures and words but it functions similarly: a quick, revealing quip that strikes at a particular truth. At their best, memes can be the apex of internet-literate modern humour. You need to be fluent in issues of the day; you need an eye for visual comedy and a ear for tone and pace. Goodfellow, incidentally, thinks it is important to credit the author, lending credence to the sense that memes are creative property.

There were, of course, other slightly less profound offerings. A picture of Joe Biden as a young man which went viral didn’t say anything much apart from, “wow, Joe Biden was a hot young man”. Sad Barron Trump, one of last week’s offerings, was respectable, if you’re OK with using a lonely 10-year old as a viral joke — which, apparently, everyone is. Barron was on stage as his father delivered a campaign victory speech, his eyes glassy, his expression disturbed. “Je suis Barron,” quipped the online mob; “Barron Trump is how we’re all feeling now”Twitter wrote in a report for its Moments news service.

Predictably, Melania Trump has been subjected to the crude misogyny that most liberals affect to denounce. But this week she also become a figure of fun. Many of the Melania memes take her plagiarism of a Michelle Obama speech as a kick-off point: images include Melania, resplendent in front of an American flag, under the words, “a proud independent black woman: Melania Trump”, another features her looking pensive, under the banner: “speech -writing degree: Trump University”.

An image of the meeting between Obama and Trump suggested choice captions, many riffing on Trump’s disconsolate expression. In one version, where the President and President-elect sit, both a bit slumped, the inscription reads, “when you lie on your CV and then get the job”.

Another says, “when you lied about your knowledge of Excel and now have to break down the entire department’s budget by 4pm”. Another, more bittersweet offering: “when you both can’t believe you’re President”.

A standout tweet imagines a future with a different shape. “Biden: Maybe we make our own country and he won’t be invited.” “Obama: Joe.” “Biden: And MAYBE THIS TIME WE CALL IT THE BLACK HOUSE RIGHT BARACK.”

Obviously it doesn’t resolve anything. But resilience is its own form of resistance — and as long as we’re collapsing seriousness with humour, we’ll preclude apocalypse. Chin up, and retweet.

Follow Phoebe Luckhurst on Twitter: @phoebeluckhurst

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