Such jokes were legion. Last century.
Hit post too soon
Gay?! Ancient Rome was like Kendom - lots of ripped guys doing stuff with horses.
That’s down to the self referential nature of (what the meme calls) Millenial Humor. “Everybody gangsta till” is an established meme.
The original is pretty easy to understand - somebody posted the below GIF with the caption “Everybody gangsta until the cockroach starts flying”.
It’s not particularly obscure - the caption is poking fun at the guy who is confident in his ability to deal with the cockroach (“is gangsta”) until the roach starts flying, at which point both he and the lady filming freak out.
The thing about meme culture is, when you see this video, you feel a certain way. To get overly philosophical about it, there’s a qualia you experience that encompasses the entire GIF - the experience of being confident in your ability to deal with a situation until an unexpected turn of events changes the situation.
Through endless variety and repetition (this meme has been going strong for like 7 years), the phrase “everybody gangsta till” comes to embody the whole experience, and becomes a shorthand way to communicate that feeling.
That’s the first stage of the meme - lots of very similar ideas, like “everybody gangsta till the spider starts moving” or “everybody gangsta till the donuts start hissing”.
At this point we are still reinforcing the original meaning of the meme - confidence followed by fear.
At this point the meme may start to get a little weirder, more exotic:
The meme may also start to cross polinate with other, similar memes:
Eventually the meme becomes so established and well known that the point changes. Instead of making memes that reinforce the qualia involved (in this case “confidence followed by fear”) you start to make memes that invoke the qualia in a situation where it would normally be inappropriate in order to generate humor.
That’s why in 2018, when this meme had been around for about 3 years, you started to see a new variant - “Everybody gangsta till the pants start walking”. This caption would be associated to videos of pants walking on their own (with the joke being that you should be scared that your pants are coming for you? It’s getting pretty abstract here!).
I think you can see now, we are almost there. The meme in the image above is specifically a reference to the “pants start walking” variety of the meme, with the 5g tower looking like the walking pairs of pants do. The joke is that fears about 5g towers are ridiculous; this is shown by taking the position that the fears are actually rational, and we will all see when the fears come true and “the 5g towers start walking” - but of course that’s a ridiculous eventuality.
Note that the folks making memes that parody the “pants” variant of the meme may very well have no idea what the original source of the meme was. Know Your Meme is a website that tries to keep track of meme evolution (which is fascinating to me on an anthropological level. IMHO this is a sociologist’s goldmine) but meme creators don’t necessarily care or think about any of that.
This means that the meaning of a meme can change over time. A favorite example is the “Peter Parker Glasses” meme.
This meme is used to basically state, “this thing is like that thing”, either literally or as a joke.
Here we see two examples- Peter thinks he sees the TikTok app or a black hole, but with his glasses on he can clearly see that it’s just shit, or a kitchen burner.
However… if you remember the movie… Peter sees better without his glasses because of his new spidey powers! Yes, at some point people reposting this meme forgot this, and messed it up, and since the meme makes more sense to someone who doesn’t know the original when the glasses make things clearer, that’s the version that became more popular.
There is, of course, a meme pointing this out:
People have been scared of walking “pale green pants with nobody inside them” for fifty years. Plus ça change.
Like this?
(Roman gladiators ate a vegetarian diet)
Oh. I guess I didn’t really touch on that.
Sorry, I’m only a few years older than the oldest of Zoomers, but that one is tough for me too.
The face I’ve seen a few places, most notably the STONKS image -
Which just means, “I like it when something I own becomes more valuable” and is used to celebrate when that happens. But he isn’t specific to that - he’s common in a lot of “low effort” memes.
Apparently his name is Meme Man, and the Zoomers appreciate him in and of himself and make memes about him to celebrate him (whereas previously the trend was just to use him as a generic figure).
I guess a good way to explain it is, Zoomer memes are memes about memes. If Millenial memes are self referential in order to establish a qualia, Zoomer memes are entirely about self reference.
It’s more a reference to Siren Head, as that’s literally what is depicted.
Thanks for the great explanations both @Babale & @MrDibble.
As to the Millennial one, I was already vaguely familiar with the “everybody gangsta until …” idea. And it was obvious from context even with no background knowledge. No different really than Mike Tyson’s famous comment “Everybody got a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth”.
I did not know of Sirenhead or of the walking pants memes. But clearly the pic is of a giant scary monster / machine moving scarily through a wrecked wasteland. The Tripods of Orson Welles infamous radio performance of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds comes immediately to mind.
The 5G part is more interesting. That’s where the whimsy comes in.
Jokes in any era and any culture are about taking a shared experience or common knowledge and adding an unexpected twist. Absent the “shared” part the joke is just a “Huh?” to the audience.
Clearly the Zoomers live in a world of widely shared memes in the sense of one-panel comics plus captions. Which of course are just delivery vehicles for causing individual ideas to become shared ideas. Just at supercharged speed and scale versus how pop culture spread in the 1950s or 1970s or 1990s. And because of the opt-in nature of that spread, those of us on the outside will never know what we’re missing while those on the inside are swimming in it. And are reveling in their in-crowd status vs. the clueless outsiders. Everybody loves speaking in code in front of the proles.
The shear ease and speed of creating and disseminating derivatives of these shared ideas means one really needs to subscribe to the full firehose not to be quickly left behind. And being one of those cognoscenti surfing the bleeding edge of that tsunami of evolving cross-pollinating ideas is a position of high status within the culture.
Now make all that into a one-panel one-liner meme.
…
And props to Babale for helping unwhoosh this. So what happening is that later Boomers and Xers are overthinking it because we mistake the “Roman Empire” part as important to make a point.
(Older Boomers though may think it’s part of some conspiracy…)
The only two times I think about it is if I am playing Rome: Total War (which I very rarely play these days) or if I am thinking about the collapse of the US empire and how Rome relates to that (this is occurs to me on occasion).
Ah! You are correct good sir! I was actually not familiar with “Siren Head”. That is a good demonstration of what I said earlier - most of the time, the people iterating on memes have only partial knowledge of what came before, which is why the meaning of memes shifts over time.
Yeah, exactly. To use yet another meme to make the point:
You really can’t beat something like TikTok (at least, the way the kids use it) for rapidly establishing a meaning for a repeated image or theme and then reiterating on it quickly. Like you said, you have to be immersed in it to keep up - otherwise, you just get occassional flashes of understanding when you run into a meme that hadn’t been iterated on too much yet.
Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. The original joke is “they think I’m a crazed sex fiend who thinks about getting laid all the time, but really, I’m just here thinking about…”
There are lots of jokes along these lines. Someone earlier mentioned Star Wars, or superheroes, or the price of gas:
Obviously, (some) men do think about Rome a lot. That’s what makes the meme funny. But it could have been about anything that met two criteria:
- is not sexual
- men tend to think about more than women do
The Rome variety just blew up in mainstream sources because of what Rome means to them.
The “couple in bed” meme, before it was a meme:
Yeah, I think about the “Roman Empire” frequently throughout the day, even more when I watch a “Roman Empire” site on the Internet.
What does it mean when I see the two memes about Dads and the price of gas and think they more resemble my kids than my Dad? 
Depending on how old your kids are, they could be the right age to be the dads of the kids who made these memes? 
Tired Boomer comeback: “So that’s what the kids are calling it these days?”
Zoomer memeful outcome: Soon kids really will be using “Roman Empire” in that sense and the rest of us will be clueless. All it needs is for you to make a meme and get it to catch fire on TikTok.
Truth be told I don’t have kids although my current wife has a pair of 30-somethings. But me having late 30s or early 40s sons like those in the pics is certainly plausible. Who in turn could have kids with almost 10 years of meme-making under their belts by now. Time marches on. More like jogs now, soon to be sprinting.
My daughter is almost 2 now. I always scoffed when people said this but now I’m starting to see it is true.
I gotta say, I’m a little terrified of the memes the kids my daughter’s age will eventually make. They’ll probably just zap emotion and sensory input straight into each others’ brains or something.
Beware the Blipvert!