Launched around 9 p.m. on Jan. 30, within less than 24 hours, a Facebook group Guelph Memes gained over 3,000 likes.

The premise was simple. Use meme generators like memegenerator.net, combine a popular online meme image with a jokey truism about Guelph, and post the result on the group’s wall for other visitors to read and respond to.

All of the favourites are there: Trollface, Forever Alone, Y U NO Guy, All the Things, Philosoraptor, Scumbag Steve, Most Interesting Man in the World, Business Cat, Hipster Kitty, Socially Awkward Penguin, Insanity Wolf, Success Kid and more make appearances to offer their insights on Guelph city and student life. Even some of the elements of those classic characters have been appropriated in a typical meme fashion to make statements about basic Guelph commonplaces. (Scumbag Steve’s hat has been combined with new characters like the Guelph transit bus and our more than daring campus squirrels.)

I am one of the thousands that have hopped on for the ride, but I’m conflicted about the seat I’ve taken.

The comedic appeal of an Internet meme is intentionally vast. In the case of the Guelph memes, if not everyone in Guelph can relate, at least students can. The messages pertain to many, and that’s translated in the hits the site has garnered, along with the masses of “likes” and “LOLs” that foot each of the posts.

What I don’t understand is how I find these so funny.

Whenever I think about what people find funny, I think back four years, to an exercise in a sociology survey course. We were asked some variant of this question: “What do you find the most funny? (A) Jokes that lots of people get; or (B) jokes that only some people get?”

An estimate on my part would peg that class at containing about 300 students, and results in favour of the latter option were sweeping. People favoured jokes for their exclusivity over their inclusivity, and I was among them. But here, that old Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to belong to a club that accepts people like himself doesn’t seem to apply. Even Guelph Meme’s “about” section acknowledges, “You know you can relate.”

What changed over the last four years? What altered what people found funny?

Scrolling through what are already seemingly endless pages of memes on the Guelph Memes Facebook group, I realized that an answer was staring me right in the face (insert Conspiracy Keanu meme here): the Internet.

Having adopted online messaging and communication practices many years ago, people have developed a great, non-verbal way to signal their response to humour. Instead of saying “ha ha” – an exclamation that can only too easily be misinterpreted as sarcastic when read – we started saying “LOL.” The great irony of LOLing is that so often, it doesn’t indicate laughing out loud at all, but a silent “yes, that is clever” kind of response to something that is recognizably intended for a humourous effect. “Like”ing serves the same purpose. Think of it as a courtesy laugh.

This is what happens so often when scrolling through pages and pages of things like Internet memes. Many LOLs are given, but seldom laughs are heard. So maybe Internet memes aren’t funny, and we’re simply acknowledging the efforts of the creators.

I still don’t have a definitive answer to my question, but either way, I like where Guelph Memes is coming from.

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