This image is a reference to the four-square Drake template – originally Drake holding up a hand and turning away from something disapprovingly in the top half, while pointing favorably to something else in the lower half – featuring Xzibit rather than Drake, himself meme-famous for “yo dawg we heard you like cars, so we put a car in your car so you can drive while you drive”, to whose recursive nature this image is of course an homage. In the upper left panel, Xzibit is looking away disappointedly from the upper right, which contains a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of the biblical Tower Of Babel. In the lower left, Xzibit is now looking favorably towards an image of another deeply nested meme.
This particular meme features the lead singer from Nickelback holding up a picture frame, a still from the video of their song “Photograph”. The “you know I had to do it to ’em” guy is in the distant background. Inside, the frame is cut in four by a two-axis graph, with “authoritarian/libertarian” on the Y axis and “economic-left/economic-right” on the X axis, overlaid with the words “young man, take the breadsticks and run, I said young man, man door hand hook car gun“, a play on both an old bit about bailing out of a bad conversation while stealing breadsticks, the lyrics to The Village People’s “YMCA”, and adding “gun” to the end of some sentence to shock its audience. These lyrics are arranged within those four quadrants in a visual reference to “loss.jpg”, a widely derided four-panel webcomic from 2008.
Taken as a whole the image is an oblique comment on the Biblical “Tower Of Babel” reference, specifically Genesis 11, in which “… the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” and the proliferation of deeply nested and frequently incomprehensible memes as a form of explicitly intra-generational communication.
So, yeah, there’s a lot going on in there.
I asked about using alt-text for captioning images like that in a few different forums the other day, to learn what the right thing is with respect to memes or jokes. If the image is the joke, is it useful (or expected) that the caption is written to try to deliver the joke, rather than be purely descriptive?
On the one hand, I’d expect you want the punchline to land, but I also want the caption to be usable and useful, and I assume that there are cultural assumptions and expectations in this space that I’m unaware of.
As intended, the question I asked wasn’t so much about “giving away” the punchline as it is about ensuring its delivery; either way you have to give away the joke, but does an image description phrased as a joke help, or hinder (or accidentally insult?) its intended audience?
I’m paraphrasing, but a few of the answers all said sort of the same useful and insightful thing: “The tool is the description of the image; the goal is to include people in the conversation. Use the tool to accomplish the goal.”
Which I kind of love.
And in what should not have stopped surprising me ages ago but still but consistently does, I was reminded that accessibility efforts support people far outside their intended audience. In this case, maybe that description makes the joke accessible to people who have perfectly good eyesight but haven’t been neck deep in memetics since they can-hazzed their first cheezeburgers and don’t quite know why this deep-fried, abstract level-nine metareference they’re seeing is hilarious.