On November 4, 25-year-old New Zealand politician Chloë Swarbrick used the phrase as a rebuttal to one of her older colleagues in Parliament after the man heckled her during a speech about climate change. The creator of Fleabag thus performs and parodies a distinct form of femininity vastly different from her own, or, as the narrator of the skit puts it, her character is one of ‘the hottest people from the worst towns’.

For this reason, I will analyse the relationship between text and image on ‘loveofhuns’ via three posts that contain various celebrities, modes of comedy and types of content: from videos to images to text.sits alongside industrialised image management and therefore has the potential to be resistant to or even destabilise the brand identity of an individual celebrity, it is progressively being deployed in a more self-aware manner, drawing on irony and camp and becoming part of the image-making strategy of celebrities.

This ambiguity has led to ‘its appropriation to both conservative and radical ends, both to mock the weak and to provide a space in which to challenge and upturn social conventions that serve to stigmatise and alienate those marginalised by mainstream society’ ( Davies and Ilott, 2018: 6). Content refers to the ideas and ideologies conveyed by a meme; form contains the visual and audible patterns in the meme – its mise-en-scène (or meme-en-scène); and stance refers to how the audience positions themselves in relation to the text ( Shifman, 2013b). It’s inclusive: if we’re laughing, then we’re laughing along with our fellow huns, not at them’ ( Levine, 2020).

The accepted explanation and justification for all this is that the old have ruined things for the young: we’re responsible for climate change, for income inequality, for the cascading series of financial crises, for the prohibitive cost of higher education. In this section, the chav(ette)s will be considered as an object of laughter in popular culture before examining how huns have been seen as both objects and subjects of laughter.

New Zealand MP Chlöe Swarbrick (born 1994) reacted to a heckle from fellow MP Todd Muller (born 1968) with the phrase "OK boomer". Boomers — the generation born roughly between 1946 and 1965 — scoff that millennials expect “participation trophies” for doing the bare minimum. Television has ‘always had its eyes on women’ ( Spigel and Mann, 1992: vii), and it has been noted since the 1980s – in Tania Modleski’s (1982 [1979]) influential work on soap operas – that mass culture’s low status is intertwined with its relation to women and the feminine. Perhaps, in the future, it’s worth eschewing the meme altogether and having one more conversation across the generation gap. The moment that happened, I was ready to clock off early, pour myself a ‘secco, (and say) “my job here is done”’ ( Levine, 2020).But that misreading also feeds the meme — because baby boomers failing to understand the point of OK boomer is, well, the point of OK boomer. Overall, from other content creators on Twitch and YouTube, it seems that they're recognizing the grooming issue and the nude photo problem, but don't seem interested in bashing, hating, or cancelling him. Yet it simultaneously places a distinct spotlight on a hyperfeminine form of maternalism that signals the rise of neo-conservative values ( Littler, 2013: 238).

Perseverance is key to the kingdom of redemption; use the key with responsibility and ye shall find the pathway to freedom. My engineering org has 40 engineers in it, but the CEO won't let me hire any dedicated engineering managers. Swarbrick was castigated for bringing the meme into a political forum — but as she herself made clear in a subsequent essay for the Guardian, the meme represents a wealth of generational political concerns: “My ‘OK boomer’ comment in parliament was off-the-cuff, albeit symbolic of the collective exhaustion of multiple generations set to inherit ever-amplifying problems in an ever-diminishing window of time,” she wrote.I use Shifman’s framework to examine these three dimensions while situating the meme within British cultural practices. Fair enough, I suppose, though it does seem unjust to direct one’s anger at the average middle-class senior citizen struggling to survive on social security rather than raging at, let’s say, the Koch brothers the Sacklers, the big banks, and the fossil-fuel lobbyists who have effectively dismantled the EPA. To older generations it may feel backward, but letting go of certain expectations can go a long way toward mutually beneficial interactions. Katrin Horn (2017) defines camp as ‘a parodic device that uses irony, exaggeration, theatricality, incongruity, and humor to question the pretext’s status as “original” or “natural”’ (p. And many baby boomers seem to be making her point for her by misunderstanding what OK boomer is about.