In his landmark 1976 book “The Selfish Gene,” evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins sought to offer a scientific account for progress and change in human culture.
According to Dawkins, just as the gene serves as the basic unit of biological evolution, cultural evolution breaks down into its own set of units, which he famously termed memes.
Regardless of the validity or importance of Dawkins’ actual scientific propositions (which I am not at all knowledgeable enough to discuss), one thing is certain: that single turn of phrase has become the greatest common identifier for an entire generation’s sense of humor.
Today’s “memes,” although not entirely identical with Dawkins’ original notion, are still — in my estimation — deserving of our serious intellectual attention.
This may be a surprising sentiment for many, and understandably so. What could there possibly be to say about the kind of nonsense kids these days are coming up with on social media?
As a member of Gen Z who barely recalls a time before the internet’s current omnipresence, meme culture has played a prominent role in my coming-of-age and left an indelible mark on my sense of humor.  
Having spent so much time around memes, I have come to see them not only as a quick comedic escape but also as a rich social phenomenon with complex aesthetic implications. 
In Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the paradigm work for writing about American subculture, great emphasis is placed on the irreducible qualities of its subject.
For Sontag, camp style and culture are not simply “ideas” in our usual sense of the word. They are practical descriptors that relentlessly resist definitive definition and intellectualization. 
Rather, she asserts that camp is better understood in terms of its “sensibility” — a subtle, somewhat elusive description which I think offers the best framework for thinking about meme culture as well. 
One could easily explain away the increasingly dynamic nature of online trends and the template-like structure of meme creation without ever really getting to the core of how these memes are experienced.  
Still, Sontag explicitly warns of the difficulties involved in trying to adequately articulate sensibility. 
I think what makes the essence of meme culture so difficult to capture in words is the immense amount of explicitly non-verbal social and visual context that can be layered over a single image.    
A 2020 “Art in America” article by art historians Ara Merjian and Mike Rugnetta makes a fascinating connection between certain elements of meme culture and novelist Umberto Eco’s notion of “open work,” which refers to an artistic creation that involves some level of ambiguity in where it, as an individual work, begins and ends. 
Similarly, memes rarely exist in a vacuum. Memes are created in conversation with one another, building on and/or subverting what came before them. The limits of what constitutes a meme are never as clear as they might seem.
These “open works,” especially those that emerge from Gen Z circles, carry with them an underpinning attitude that, for the most part, can really only be appreciated if a substantial amount of time has been spent within that online community.  
This generational attitude — or “sensibility,” as Sontag might have described it — is characterized by a pervading sense of irony and love of subversion. 
This is often the issue when members of Gen Z attempt to explain a meme to someone from an older generation: there is no shared sensibility.
Although there are certainly examples of memes that anyone can instantly relate to, anything below the upper crust of the “meme-sphere,” so to speak, quickly devolves into outlandish phrases and symbols that will likely appear unintelligible, or even just plain stupid, to anyone who didn’t grow up within a specific stratum of internet culture. 
More often than not, a meme just cannot be explained with words. In certain ways, meme culture often functions like a generational inside joke — a joke you must be in on to appreciate.   
Evan Leonhard is a 19-year-old English and philosophy sophomore from New Orleans.