These are my favorite memes of all time. I really like the bizarre backwards reality these memes present. Like of course it is bad to throw a car battery into the ocean, but there is something really funny about being smug and feeling accomplished for doing it. Similarly, the astronaut meme reminds me of internet conspiracies or flat earthers who think there are globalists controlling the world. When really the world is being controlled by the state of Ohio. The most boring and mundane place in the world. I like this version specifically also because of the way it looks like it was made in ms paint. It tells me not a lot of time was put into it and that to me adds a lot to its meaning.
To me these memes are most similar in their type of humor. They are both full of irony and what makes them great is the ridiculous situations they present and how those relate to our real world. They are most different in their form, going back here to how Shifman defines form in their article. One meme is a real photo that someone took and that was recontextualized with the text. The other is a drawing created specifically to convey the message of the meme.
Looking now specifically at the car batteries meme. I want to again return to Shifman’s ideas of content, form and stance for dissecting this meme. To me, memes can vary in how consistent these three aspects are across a type of meme. For this meme, the content is what always stays the same while the form changes. What that means is that the joke of throwing car batteries into the ocean is present in each meme but the image that conveys this joke is what differs. For example I have seem a similar version of this meme where it is an image of a cartoon man facing the ocean with several car batteries in the water and text above it saying “Oh you love the ocean? Then name five brands of car batteries that you’ve thrown in it”. The stance of this meme is somewhat complex this meme could easily be misunderstood, as being unfunny or harmful as it advocated for polluting the ocean. But in reality, this is what make it funny. The stance is to play the fool and be proud of something that everyone knows is actually quite bad.
Looking at the astronaut meme in a similar way starting with its content, form and stance we see a meme that can have varying content but whose form is constant. This particular meme is a template. The subjects of the Ohio earth, the American astronaut and the Ohio astronaut can be replaced with what ever the creator want to give the image new meaning. I have seen countless memes that do just that. But with these changes to the content so does the stance change. The original stance to me is a joke referencing conspiracy theorists. But another version of the meme that references Plato’s allegory of the cave has s different stance in being a reference to that other piece of culture.