Invasion of the Meme

For a Facebook page that was created just over a week ago, the glorious St Andrews Memes – which have no doubt already graced your newsfeed incessantly by the time you read this – has proved a remarkably successful hit with the St Andrews student community. Can you tell how many times that picture of Boromir has been splashed across your wall or indeed, how many Lizard-related memes you have seen, prompting you to chuckle and snort awkwardly into your coffee in a public area?

St Andrews Memes was the brainchild of Zorbey Turkalp who conceived of the idea with friends. Talking to The Stand, Turkalp said that “the University at my home city (UBC) had created one and I found it really funny.” Commenting on the quick popularity of the Facebook page Turkalp was “quite surprised by the popularity of it but not totally shocked as the UBC memes page is incredibly popular there.”

One thing that will not have escaped the attention of students – particularly those from Scotland – is how quickly students from other Universities, such as Strathclyde in Glasgow, began to share the same idea and created memes pages of their own.

Regarding the much more unprecedented spread of memes pages across Scottish universities, Turkalp was much more “surprised…I thought we’d just have a few laughs and in-jokes, not 3000 likes…But I suppose there is the whole uni competition thing where people want to claim they’re better/funnier than other people i.e. ‘if they can do it why not us’, so that’s where that comes from. I love the fact that this is so widespread now though.”

Well thank you indeed Turkalp and friends for reminding us of the funny side to St Andrews student life (which can sometimes be hard to find when in the throes of furious essay writing and deadline-keeping), and for reminding this writer once more of the oft-forgotten nocturnal perils of the Lizard.

If you haven’t seen it yet (which just seems unlikely), click here.