Why and how I make memes to add a little humor & entertain an audience for my public talks at conferences/meetups.

Yes, that’s right. I’m gonna talk about memes in this article.

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade, you already know what a meme is and would have seen hundreds, if not thousands of them, on the Internet. On the off chance that you have been living under a rock, here’s the official definition by Google:

(Pronounced “Meems”; not “Mimes”, not “Me-Mes”)

Wait, the first definition doesn’t seem to be relevant, let me fix that right up…

(Ooo, look, it even has a Greek origin!)

Ah, that’s better. Now, here are a few sample memes:

Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about why I’m even writing about, what may seem at first sight, a very trivial and ridiculous topic to write about.

“So why are you writing about memes, Bapu? 🤔”

That’s a fantastic question! Why am I deviating from my usual tendency to write technical blogs?

Because as a Public Speaker, I want to bring a few super-duper important points to everyone’s attention:

• It’s always great to have some humor in public talks. It not only makes an audience laugh (or at least giggle/smile), but it also makes a talk very engaging. I can’t imagine going to a talk where all they have is a bunch of technical slides and the speakers droned on about something very technical for 45 minutes straight. 😴

• Memes are a good way to have humor in talks.

• Memes communicate ideas well. Memes tell the audience what I want to tell my audience, but only in a much more humorous and engaging way.

I need to do right by my audience and make sure that my talk is interesting, and isn’t one where they doze off in between or pull out their phones to start playing Angry Birds. Unfortunately, I’ve seen both of these situations occur at a technical event that I had recently attended.

It feels like my responsibility to make sure I prepare the presentation for my talk as best as I can, because as a speaker, I’ve been entrusted by the event organiser with the responsibility to deliver a good talk and provide value to my audience while also keeping them engaged.

Still not convinced about using memes in your technical talk? Let’s dive into a case study: my 3rd talk of 2018, which was about Kotlin vs Java.

Case Study: My Kotlin vs Java Talk

<iframe src="https://medium.com/media/226421aaba18df8bd0ddc5d4f99bbfca" frameborder=0></iframe>

Scene: I was supposed to give a talk about why Android Developers should learn and adopt Kotlin over Java in my university. My audience was every student and professor in the Computer Science department.

I keep in mind that it’s best to adapt my sense of humor according to my audience. The best metric is age.

If I’ve got a lot of younger people in the crowd, I can be rest assured that they’d have a good understanding of the latest memes, joke formats and pop culture references. Simply put, what this means for me is that they’d understand my jokes.

If I’ve got older people in my audience, I’d keep the jokes and pop culture references in my presentation to a bare minimum.

For my presentation, I decided to have a good mix of jokes/memes and just plain, technical slides.

Here are some of the memes from my talk:

Notice that each of these memes express what I want to tell my audience in a way that’s a 10x more interesting than if I had just plain text in my slides.

Why don’t we compare them:

What’s better: the confused girl meme, or the plain old text?

What’s better: the weird animal meme, or the plain old text?

Behold, the famous ‘Disloyal Man’ meme. And yeah, then you have your plain old text.

The ‘Highway Drift’ meme. And again, the plain old text.

Now, if I had plain text slides, I could have made them look prettier with better fonts, better backgrounds, and more, but at the end of the day, my audience needs something visual to process the information I’m providing them faster.

Human beings are visual creatures and we tend to remember stuff that we see and hear only if there’s something about them that really catches our attention. And for most people, they tend to remember things that they’ve laughed about or basically anything that takes them by surprise, stuff that they didn’t expect. Some good audience reactions that I aim for when I present memes in my talk include, but are not limited to:

• “Huh, where did that come from? 🤯”

• “Oh wow, that’s pretty neat!”

• “Ooo, that’s clever!”

• “That’s kinda cheeky.”

• “Hahahahahahaha! 😂” (my personal favorite)

Now that I’ve talked about my case study, let’s talk about how to actually make a meme…

“How do I make a meme, Bapu?”

Step 1: Download the Meme Generator app

Well, the technical part of making a meme is pretty simple. I use Meme Generator on my phone. It’s an app that has popular meme templates that I can easily customize with text and custom stickers, and then save it on to my phone or share with my friends.

Meme Generator

Find Meme Generator for Android here and for iOS here.

Step 2: Making a meme with a meme template

Once the app is installed, select a meme template from the app and customize the text as needed.

I like to think of something creative, something cheeky or something hilarious.

I tend to think something along the lines of, “How can I express my idea in <insert-meme-template-here>?” or I could even go the other way around and think, “Which meme template would suit <insert-idea-here>?”.

Our minds all work differently, so get as creative as possible and make a meme that’s best suited for the presentation at hand! ✨

Step 3 (Optional): Making a meme with an image from your gallery

I love making custom memes, i.e. memes that aren’t a meme template already. The downside is that not everyone in the audience may get it but it’s fun to use an image from my gallery as a custom meme in the app.

The app also supports making custom stickers.

And last but not least, I do not shy away from including myself in my silly memes!

Yup, that’s me being the Disloyal Man for once.

Conclusion

While the topic of my talk may be interesting, it never hurts to have humor in my talk, unless the conference where I’m giving the talk has a serious, straight-forward undertone.

Additionally, when I’m including memes in my talk, not everyone will have the same sense of humor or the same sphere of pop culture references, so I try to tread carefully there. 😉

Anyway, memes aren’t always about being funny, they’re about being fun.

To wrongly phrase a very famous quote:

“A picture is worth a thousand words, but a meme is worth a thousand laughs at best and a few dozen smiles at worst.”

— Bapusaheb Patil

This article was originally published on Be Yourself.