The complicated appeal of the Harambe meme

By Katie Rogers

New York Times

In the months since Harambe, a 17-year-old silverback gorilla, was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo after he grabbed and dragged a child who had fallen into his enclosure, zoo officials have tried to return to normal. But the people of the internet have other plans.

Cries for justice for the ape — some earnest and some nonsensical — have spawned a meme with a life all its own, complete with goofy song lyrics, Photoshop creations and some hilarious mashups with other memes.

The meme has also been used to spread harmful messages and revive racist tropes: One high-profile example is the harassment of the “Ghostbusters” actress Leslie Jones, whose website appeared to have been hacked Wednesday when a video of the gorilla was among nude photos posted to her personal website.

In the case of the zoo, the harassment fell somewhere in between. The zoo’s Twitter account has been flooded with so many jokes and harsh comments invoking Harambe that officials saw fit to issue a plea, asking the internet to relent.

“We are not amused by the memes, petitions and signs about Harambe,” Thane Maynard, the zoo’s director, said in an email to The Associated Press this week. “Our zoo family is still healing, and the constant mention of Harambe makes moving forward more difficult for us.”

For example, replying to a Twitter post about zebras and their unique stripes, one user wrote: “U had a unique way of killing Harambe.”

On a post celebrating Elephant Day, another wrote: “Harambe loved elephants.”

Maynard’s words of protest seemed only to make things worse. His Twitter account was hacked with pro-Harambe messages.

On Monday, the second-oldest zoo in America deleted its Twitter account. Maynard also deleted his own. He did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

It should surprise no one that the internet can ruin the online presence of an individual or an organization, and there is a recent template for how things work after high-profile animal killings. Even after the American dentist Walter J. Palmer apologized for killing Cecil, the Zimbabwean lion who was lured off his sanctuary and shot during a game hunt in July 2015, he had to temporarily leave his home in Minnesota.

More than a year later, the dentist’s online presence remains dismantled, and a petition to extradite him to Zimbabwe is still circulating online.

In the Harambe case, the fallout has been fueled by genuine sorrow and anger from animal rights activists who wanted justice for the gorilla after he was killed in May.

Depending on how the meme is used, #JusticeforHarambe can either be associated with a petition with nearly 500,000 signatures that seeks to hold the boy’s parents responsible for his wandering into the exhibit, or serve as a launchpad for jokes that lampoon activism, according to Ryan Milner, an assistant professor of communications at the College of Charleston and the author of the coming book “The World Made Meme.”

“It becomes a farcical way to skewer that social media activism rather than actually going after social media advocacy,” Milner said in an interview. “It’s a little bit of a subtle shade whether it’s intentional or not.”

Various iterations of the Harambe meme have been circulating around the internet for months, fodder for writers who have examined how it skittered across the internet after the gorilla’s death, which gained national prominence. The meme’s life span is not so unusual (the Rickroll turned 9 years old this year, and the Crying Jordan meme just won’t die) — but the sheer mainstream scope of it is.

Harambe has been nominated for president and suggested as an alternative name for Tropical Storm Hermine. Harambe fans have created songs that play with the lyrics of popular tunes.

Others have opened parody accounts that spread fake #HarambeFacts. And then there is the video that featured the actor Danny Trejo, which birthed another (unprintable) offshoot of the meme. Offline, merchandise exists, of course: An artist in Florida is selling a Harambe painting for $1,500.

“The mainstream attention and the viral spread of the story itself means that it’s easier for people to get the joke,” Milner said. This meme is also an example of more people understanding what these things are and what they can do, which allows for participation and remixing on a “massive scale,” he added.

But when all types of people are in on the joke, the jokes can devolve into explicit racism. When Jones, the actress, briefly signed off Twitter in July, it was partly because people had sent her messages that compared her physical features to Harambe’s.

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Mercer University who is writing a book with Milner called “Between Play and Hate: Antagonism, Humor and Mischief Online,” said that the life cycle of a meme like this one — which has been remixed and repurposed for humor and cruelty — has a way of dulling our sense of the offline implications of an online joke.

“A lot of the people participating probably just thought it was funny and they didn’t think that they were being mean,” Phillips said. “But who cares if that’s what they thought they were doing? It was really devastating for her and other people who have to see that racist nonsense.”

It’s hard to say when a meme like this one will finally be laid to rest. As Milner pointed out, the Harambe meme is what happens when the internet becomes old enough to archive its own digital folklore, and mix and match those memes with whatever comes next.

“As more people become more familiar with more of these memes, you get this cross-pollination,” Milner said. “Which is maybe why we’re seeing less stand-alone memes and more of this mixture of this kind of melting pot that we’ve created.”