My Battle with Understanding Memes

In our digital cultural rhetoric course we are tasked with a final project involving the creation of memes. This is a problem for me: I simply don't get memes. I never really grasp what the remix image - often something involving pop culture that I'm out of the loop on - is supposed to do. I've always thought that memes are supposed to somehow be funny, but I never find them funny. When we were asked to read a chapter from Limor Shipman's book Memes in Digital Culture entitled "Defining Internet Memes," I thought I would come away finally understanding what the heck a meme even is. Unfortunately, his definition simply muddied the waters. Now what I had thought were these single image-text mash-ups using pop culture references to make some sort of joke had been expanded to be a three-part definition:

"I define an Internet meme as: (a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users" (41).

Shipman then provides definitions of content, form, and stance, making the definition of a meme vastly more complex and confusing -- apparently, video parodies are also memes. I am left, then, utterly distraught that I will never truly understand meme culture; I suppose I am simply meme illiterate. Though, I do hold out some hope; our next reading is another chapter from Shipman's book: "Meme Genres."