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About
Increasingly Verbose memes, also known as simplification memes, are an emerging hybrid of typical Verbose/Classy memes and simplification memes. A standard image meme is depicted as the first frame. Successive frames involve the image degrading in quality, either being graphically malformed using an image editor or redrawn in Microsoft Paint, whilst any text in the image becomes unnaturally verbose to the point where it is difficult to understand without the original context of the image. The meme is intended to satirize the original image, which is seen by the community as a ‘bad’ meme.
Origins
Increasingly Verbose memes originate from a predecessor known as a ‘simplification’ meme, which has existed back to the late 1960s. Simplification memes involve degrading an image, audio file, or video to the point where it is unintelligible.
The first appearance of a ‘simplification’ meme was in 1969, where experimental musician Alvin Lucier composed and performed ‘I am Sitting in a Room’. This sound artwork involved Lucier narrating an original text and recording the spoken word on cassette tape. The spoken word is then played and recorded again by another tape recorder. This process was repeated to the point where Lucier’s speaking was unintelligible and underlying frequencies in the room dominated the tape:
Similar activities would occur in threads on 4chan, where often a .gif image would be compressed over and over and reposted by the ‘OP’ until the content within the gif would become unintelligible.
Perhaps a more contemporary example is from 2010, where YouTuber canzona performed a project in which he downloaded and reuploaded a video of himself talking onto the videosharing site 1,000 times:
Due to the aggressive nature of YouTube’s compression feature, canzona’s video is sequentially artifacted and destroyed over time, or ‘simplified’ to an image that is neither intelligible nor distinguishable. Similar experiments using lossy compression in images is known as generation loss, and numerous experiments have been performed online to show the effects of reposting images. These unintended effects were often considered humorous by Internet denizens and satirised the original content.
Spread
In 2015, the simplification meme style gained popularity with the new breed of ‘Ironic Memes’ as it chimed in with the current internet issues of reposting and ‘stealing’ image memes, which often involved the memes looking heavily compressed as it is repeatedly screenshotted on multiple devices, similar to that of simplification memes. During this time, Verbose/Classy memes also began to gain popularity. Eventually, meme creators on /r/coaxedintoasnafu decided that the ability to satirise a meme by both simplifying it and making it unnaturally verbose worked well together, and hence the Increasingly verbose meme style was developed.
One of the earliest Increasingly verbose memes was a parody of the Breath-in, Boi meme, in which Spongebob’s words and depiction is increased in verbosity and degraded in quality respectively with each frame:
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Mutations
Since 2015, a number of Increasingly verbose memes have emerged to further satirize the nature of non-ironic memes. Some spin-offs of the meme involve somebody narrating the text within the meme, and the audio quality degrading with each successive displayed frame, further adding to the simplification of the meme.
A new trend from /r/coaxedintoasnafu involves having the last frame of the storyboard containing an incredibly simplified/malformed image, however instead of containing extremely verbose language replacing the text, the text is instead greatly simplified and is often more direct or sinister in action to the original meme.
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In the above Donald Trump increasingly verbose meme, it is seen that in the final frame, Trump’s slogan is instead simplified to a short “USA” rather than a verbose paragraph.
