50 Laughing Together: Exploring Participatory Culture through the Lens of Kevin
50 Laughing Together: Exploring Participatory Culture through the Lens of Kevin James Memes
Thuan Tran
Since the development of social media platforms, it has strived to provide users the ability to self-express, communicate and connect with others. It has also grown into a platform where communities can be found and formed based on similar interests and views resulting in online fan groups. While the idea of manipulating photos with the addition of captions to convey meaning has long been a practice, social media plays a pivotal role in expanding the shareability of memes and generating a participatory culture within a fanbase. Not to mention the availability and ease of access in creating memes that allow most to contribute to this participatory culture.
This essay launches on a critical analysis of the participatory culture in the forms of memes creation on X which creates a community and encourages those to create or relate to the memes, placing a specific focus on the memeification of Kevin James’ photographs. James originally posted the photo to his social media pages as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the TV show, The King of Queens. This essay will analyze posts made on X from September 2023 to December 2023. Concepts such as textual poaching, parasociality, meme, participatory culture, user-generated content, and textual productivity, and parasocial and celebrity relationships will be explored with the Kevin James meme.
Overview of the issue/phenomenon
Kevin James is a comedian and actor who rose to fame during the 1990s, most notably known for working with Adam Sandler in films such as Grown-ups and for his stand-up comedy. Kevin James suddenly became an internet sensation on September 21, 2023, the user the @champagneanyone posted a photo of Kevin James with the caption, “me after [one] double rum and diet” (See figure 1). The photo showed the Comedian in 1998 posing on the set of the TV show The King of Queens as Doug Heffernan, while wearing a green flannel and shrugging while looking into the camera (Know Your Meme, n.d.). The meme quickly took off, garnering over 24,000 likes within 3 days and influenced the infinite possibility for fans to recreate the meme (Mendez II, 2023) in their interpretations. Fans were rushing to put their twist on the meme while the media was examining the sudden and abrupt fame. Within a couple of hours, as reporter Bria McNeal described it as being out of control, but the Internet loves it (McNeal, 2023). The image used for the meme came from a Getty Images promotional shot of Kevin James in 1998 for his new show The Kings and Queen. As Kendall Cunningham would describe him as weirdly comforting, many fans reciprocated the same feeling and hence the love for Kevin James grew.
Meme Culture
Memes have been integrated into our daily lives. We see them everywhere from our social media app to advertisements and appeals. It has become a global collective activity to share meme about posts one thinks