Meet Ireland’s meme makers: the people behind some of Ireland’s funniest social media accounts on how a meme is born

“It’s very referential,” he says of internet humour. “When I was 17, we’d have a meme for six months — Bad Luck Brian and those ones with the text over them were kind of staples. Now there’s a new thing maybe every week, it’s almost impossible to keep track. The speed at which things are consumed and discarded is a lot quicker.”

He points to the Handforth parish council Zoom meeting that made facilitator Jackie Weaver an internet star during lockdown last year. Michael promptly filmed himself performing it as his four-man indie band, a process which can take up to 14 hours.

“I got the video out within 24 hours, and I was just about OK for the cut-off, because I remember Jackie Weaver being on Loose Women two days later, and even I was like, ‘I don’t care about this anymore’,” he recalls with a laugh.

Michael’s video was an instant hit, gaining 38,400 likes and 1.5 million views. He’s enjoyed similar success putting a variety of clips to music, including the “what a sad little life, Jane” speech from Come Dine with Me and Liam Payne’s post-Oscars interview, which both garnered over 1.3 million views.

“I try not to do it too late at night now, because if I post something around 11 o’clock, I will not sleep for a while. It’s just a rush — you might get people who are quite famous retweeting you, and that’s always a buzz, it feels great,” he says.

Yet the relentless pace can lead to fear of missing out on a trending meme, as well as what Richie called “content brain”, where you’re always alert to tweetable moments.

“I absolutely have content brain,” says Fry. “One of the challenges I have is being able to turn it off, being able to step away for a while and come off Twitter. Obviously, it’s kind of scary when I do, because I’m like, ‘what will I miss?’ I do really like it, but at the same time I’m like, ‘am I spending too much time with this? Do I need to regulate this?’ I don’t know.”

Social media has become indispensable as a platform for comedy, but Fry notes that the difference between online and live comedy is that “online is quantifiable”.

“Likes are usually how I measure my success, rather than retweets or views. If a video doesn’t do that well, I’m like ‘well, I find it funny’, whereas with tweets, I will clean those up after a while if they haven’t done good numbers.”

Emma Doran (@EmmaLouDoran), a stand-up comic and fellow star of No Worries If Not, is known for her videos on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, such as her “mad, isn’t it?” Covid video, viewed over 420,000 times.

Going viral can be flattering, but after a certain point, Doran says she switches off. She mentions a video she posted last summer, imagining if over-30s were on Love Island, which had over 350,000 views. “It’s funny, if it goes really big, it feels like you don’t even own it anymore. It’s out of your hands,” she observes. “I kind of disengage from it then, like ‘that’s just gonna do its own thing.’”

She likes the immediacy the internet offers compared to stand-up. “I have a bit now that I want to try out on stage, but I’ll have to wait until Thursday. Online, you can have an idea, do it straightaway and post it,” she says, noting that jokes that do well online won’t always land with a live audience. “With an online sketch, it doesn’t necessarily need a big finish. It can just be what it is. Whereas if I take it to stand-up, I’ll have to elevate it.”

Fry adds: “There are things that work as tweets that aren’t as funny (offline), that only work textually. If I was to say those words on the phone, it wouldn’t be funny, but when you read them, it’s its own thing, which I think is remarkable.”

Among the most popular anonymous Irish profiles is the parody account @NotTheRTENews. The Dundalk native behind the account, who gives his name only as Ryan, started it in March 2020 to counteract lockdown boredom, but doesn’t think his aptitude for Twitter jokes would translate to a stand-up career.

“I’d be too anxious to get on a stage. I think this medium suits me,” he says. “I’m not as funny in real life as I am behind the keyboard!”

With an anonymous account, Ryan has the freedom to be more provocative — he’s currently making memes about the queen’s death — although he says he’s experienced “little to no abuse” online.

“I try not to be too offensive, but at the same time, I think with the queen’s death in particular, given the history between Ireland and Britain, I think we get a pass. It’s like the purge a wee bit for Irish Twitter,” he says.

“I shoot from the hip and hope for the best. It is nice once you see something blowing up — I’ll probably crack open a can and watch the numbers come in — but it’s important not to get too obsessed with it. It’s social media, it’s not the be-all and end-all, but it is nice all the same.

“People will message me and tell me they look forward to my tweets, they cheer them up when they’ve had a crap day, and that’s a lovely thing to hear, especially with the way things are now. Jokes and memes don’t pay the bills for people, but a good laugh can be a relief. That’s a motivation for me to keep doing it until it’s not funny anymore.”

On Instagram, @SouthDublinLife has been one of Ireland’s top meme accounts since 2018, poking fun at local stereotypes. Admin Cathal, a south Dubliner himself working in financial services, is also keen to preserve his anonymity: “Part of the appeal of the faceless meme page is it’s not me making a joke, it’s almost a societal joke. When you put a face and a name on it, it becomes ‘just that person’.”

For the first couple of years, Cathal recalls feeling under pressure to deliver. “When it was initially growing, getting 1,000-2,000 followers a week, you felt you had to churn out more content to keep getting more followers,” he explains. “Then it hit a plateau about two years ago, around 50,000 followers. I was like, ‘OK, I think that’s kind of the peak.’”

As Instagram is a more visual platform, Cathal’s focus is on creating photo and video memes. “Lots of the stuff I post is based on things I see or hear, or stories I’ve heard through friends. Any time I have even a half-baked idea, I’ll type it down on my phone,” he explains. “If I’m scrolling through videos or pictures, any time I see something that I think could be a good format, I screenshot that. Sometimes they just naturally pair up, you’ll put two and two together. It’s pretty much just a big Notes folder of half ideas and saved picture and video formats that I think might come in handy at some point.”

His most successful posts, he says, tend to be the most simplistic. “One of my most popular posts was a screenshot of the old Sky television screen, and it just said, ‘how to flex in the early 2000s in Dublin’. That got like 13,000 likes, whereas you’d have a video edit you’d spent ages on and think it’s really smart and witty and has all these nuanced layers to it, and no one cares,” he laughs.

While there’s no sure-fire formula for a good meme, Fry says it’s essential that “people can join in and contribute their ideas and interpretations”, citing an example from 2019, when a Twitter user defended ownership of assault weapons by asking: “How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?”

“The internet just descended on that, it was amazing,” says Fry. “That one was so absurd: you could add images, you could take text from other popular tweets and insert the feral hog thing into it, that became a meme in itself.”

Peter Ryan says the “reusable format” is key. “It needs to be something that is repeatable. That’s probably the baseline of what connects all these things: there’s a pattern that someone can replicate,” he explains.

This isn’t limited to phrases or static images: he points to the number one TikTokker, @Khaby00, who uses the same facial expressions and hand gestures in his silent reaction videos. “TikTokkers really create this whole new category where they are these living memes in a sense, because they keep going back to a format,” he says.

That repetitiveness can blur the lines around copying or stealing, something Cathal says is complicated by the nature of online jokes. “Lifting and reposting something is not great, but with memes, it’s kind of like taking a sample in music and making a new track out of it,” he says. “In stand-up comedy, someone tells a joke, and if someone repeats the same joke, it’s a copycat. With memes, everyone’s using the same formats and putting a new twist on it. While you’re not directly collaborating with other people, it is kind of a collaborative space.”

This ongoing evolution, he observes, is what makes internet humour exciting. “At the end of the day, something’s funny or it’s not funny, whether it’s a joke, a picture or a video,” says Cathal.

“But whereas more traditional comedy formats are probably set in stone as to what you can do, the internet allows you a lot more freedom to evolve. You’re constantly getting something new, and it’s changing as the world changes.”