Culture

Please Enjoy This Renowned Political Journalist Explaining What A “Dank Meme” Is On ‘Insiders’

[extremely boomer voice] "Watch your dank memes."

by Meg Watson  23 May 2016

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This horrifying yet inevitable collision of dank memes and Auspol has been well-documented over the past couple of years. Former Treasurer Wayne Swan was an early proponent of the movement, singlehandedly producing all the confusing bold Impact-laden contents of your aunty’s Facebook feed. Bill Shorten wasn’t too far behind. He proved himself the ultimate Man Of The People by declaring the Liberal leadership was just like #thedress.

More recently, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union have been pummelling us from all sides with these kind of hot monstrosities:

Now this steaming trash pile of #Auspol #content has been lobbed into the mainstream causing genuine debate on the ABC’s weekly political talk show Insiders.

“Every election throws up something new and this one has thrown up ‘dank memes’,” said The Courier Mail‘s National Affairs editor Dennis Atkins on yesterday’s show. “According to the website, Know Your Meme — and there is such a website called that — a dank meme is one that’s intentionally bad or bizarre; an ironic expression used to mock online viral media and in-jokes that have exhausted their comedic value.”

Then, searing the words into the annals of Australian political discourse, Atkins continued: “Watch your dank memes”.

The reaction has been about what you’d expect:

Responding to the good-natured online mockery, Atkins has also written a column on the topic in today’s Courier Mail. The piece, titled ‘Cool Kids Bring Dank Memes Into The Election Campaign But Only For A Nanosecond’, expands on his discovery of the phenomenon and marvels at how quickly social media can move on.

“We discovered that the word ‘dank’ has its origins in referring to the particular qualities of a batch of marijuana,” he writes. “Really dank marijuana is something of very high quality — a usage that led dank to also mean ‘cool’… The meme space is, by its very nature and place in the digital world, a fast-moving and constantly changing thing, which is why as soon as we mentioned it on national TV on Sunday morning the cool kids were swift to lower the internet drawbridge.”

“From cool HQ, Mark Di Stefano’s Australian BuzzFeed couch in Canberra, the word was: ‘Alright. Shut it all down.’ Another passenger on the cool bus accused us of spoiling it for everyone by exposing dank memes and thereby ruining the cool factor.”

Atkins finished by saying he was “confident” that something would replace the internet trend after he ruined it for everyone and remained “very grateful this election has shone a light on the dank meme and introduced us to the ‘Know Your Meme’ website.”

For the record, the “cool bus” look set to invite him on board.