Memes: Condescending Wonka

In today's Internet culture memes have become a very popular trend especially with the younger audience. Memes can be identified as an image paired with a specific text to create humour to the viewer. Humour usually reaches people the best and we are more attracted to forward on something humorous to others. Internet memes were first seen on websites like Reddit and Know Your Meme and were shared between a network of friends as inside jokes. Now Internet memes have grown to be seen on social networks such as twitter, Facebook and Tumblr and are continually expanding across the Internet. 

The meme I decided to look more in depth on was the Condescending Wonka memes. My reasoning for wanting to explore more about this meme was because of its popularity on Facebook and it seems to be the most common meme I have seen. "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" was one of my favourite movies as a child and when I first started seeing memes about the film I found myself being quite interested in learning more about them. The image of Willy Wonka in the meme comes from a scene in Gene Wilders 1971 musical "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" when the the character Wonka a chocolate and candy inventor asks the children if they are interested in his new invention the Everlasting Gobstopper. In the memes Wonka is seen as someone who likes to talk down to people, and was first used with the caption "You Must Be New Here" referring to people who are new at something, afterwards the image caught on by many people and was referred to as "Creepy Wonka." 

The Condescending Wonka meme I chose had the caption "Your parents bought you an iPhone, a macbook and a car? And they are paying for your school?... Please, tell me how hard your life is." I found this caption to be quite humorous because of how sarcastic and true it is that students think this way. Being in university now you constantly hear students complaining about how hard their lives are right now, but in reality these will probably be the easiest years of their lives. They don't always seem to appreciate everything their parents do for them. The Condescending Wonka memes captions seem to be endless and very popular, people are continuing to make new ones all the time. The Condescending Wonka memes can also be seen in other ways such as dry humour and signify irony such as how it was transferred into another meme where there is a picture of a Wiemaraner dog that says “Oh, you run a chocolate lab? / I am a chocolate lab.”

After looking into the Condescending Wonka memes it has opened up my curiosity to other memes and has interested me into learning more about where they come from. Once you have a good understanding of where the image or text comes from it makes the memes a lot more humorous and enjoyable.