i iz in ur memes stealin ur jokes

My memetic immune system is usually fairly hardy, probably due to prolonged exposure to stupid jokes from books like ”1001 More Jokes for Kids” with their endless variations on the knock-knock joke. However, there’s something particularly insidious about lolcats (and loldogs).

Sure, that’s excruciatingly cute but ultimately easy to resist. There are plenty of silly cute pictures of pets on the internet. It’s when the captions for the cats start borrowing on geek-lore that things get funnier. Observe what happens when a cat meets Street Fighter II or a pug Star Wars:

It just gets stranger. It seems that when a joke like this gains a certain critical mass it starts drawing in and interbreeding with other popular themes. Of course, it doesn’t take long before politics gets involved.Via a great summary of the fad over at Slate magazine I discovered that there are a bunch of people captioning past and present presidents from the US and elsewhere. Fish in a barrel really:

My defences down, I was compelled to add my own parochial riff on this theme making use of a rather disturbing picture I found through Google images.

Poor Big Ted. I wonder which window he had to go through to get himself into this situation? The square one?