Memes

The first meme is the “Bitch Please” face, which many people don’t know is actually a drawing of NBA Legend Yao Ming. The second meme is the confused Nick Young meme, who is another former NBA player. Last is the “My Next Chapter” meme, which is of Kevin Durant and makes fun of the time he left his team to go to the Warriors he just recently beat him in the playoffs.

Patrick Davidson claims that the ideal of a meme “is the concept or idea conveyed. The ideal dictates the behavior, which in turn creates the manifestation” (Davison 123). In this case, then the ideal of the Yao Ming meme would be something like “this person finds something funny” and for the Nick Young meme, the ideal would be something along the lines of “Nick Young is confused”. Lastly, the Kevin Durant meme is a little more complex because someone would have to know about Kevin Durant’s decision to join the Warriors. Kevin Durant was on a good team and was contending, but the season after the lost to the Warriors in the playoffs, Durant left. If you can’t beat them, join them. Because of that, the meme has become a trend anytime Kevin Durant loses, in which the team on his shirt is the team he lost to. Because of this, the ideal would be something like “Kevin Durant leaves for the better team”.

The behaviors of the Yao Ming meme are the image of Yao Ming as well as a “Reddit^[1] post was submitted by artist “downlow”^[2] which featured numerous drawings he had created for rage comics that were never used, including the Yao Ming drawing” (Know Your Meme). The behaviors for the Nick Young meme are Nick Young being confused on camera, Cassy Athena who “uploaded an episode of the web series Thru The Lens,^[1] which features a day in the life of Nick Young. During the show, Young makes a perplexed facial expression when his mother claims he was “a clown” in his younger years” (Know Your Meme), and spread by “the @WorldStarFunny^[4] Twitter feed [who] posted a photoshop of Young wearing a Sombrero with the caption “Que?” along with a joke about being unable to sneak out of a house. Within two years, the tweets gained over 4,000 likes and 1,900 retweets.” (Know Your Meme). The behaviors for the Kevin Durant meme are Kevin Durant in an “article entitled My Next Chapter^[1] in The Players’ Tribune that he was joining the Golden State Warriors after having spent his entire previous career with the Oklahoma City Thunder” (Know Your Meme) and “users on /r/nba began posting photoshopped versions of Kevin Durant’s picture from the “My Next Chapter” article every time the Warriors lost a game, using the logo of the winning team” (Know Your Meme).

The manifestations for the Yao Ming meme are the pixels that make up the image of Yao Ming’s face, and the manifestations for the Nick Young meme are the same. As for the Kevin Durant meme, the manifestations are the same but also the many different versions in which there is a different team logo on his chest. The manifestations I have chosen can be appealing to my target audience because they would appreciate seeing the NBA related memes.