With stress piling on students and faculty, associate dean for administration and academic governance and professor in the Lyman Briggs College Robert LaDuca has found a new way to help relieve stress and help students better connect with class material.
Memes, pictures with texts to invoke a comedic response, help with the stress of college, LaDuca said.
LaDuca said he believes people learn better with a laugh on their face and will enjoy life the more they laugh. He wants MSU Memes 2.0 to be a place where students can laugh at odd, fun situations, he said.
“You know we’re all stressed out, whether on the professor side of things or the students side of things, just lots of demands,” LaDuca said. “We need to kick back and laugh and laughter is essential for mental health, so that’s what I want the place to be.”
Business freshman Josh Lange said he thought MSU Memes 2.0 would definitely be run by someone younger than 25 years old. He definitely didn’t expect it to be someone like LaDuca, Lange said.
“I guess that kind of makes me want to be in his class,” Lange said. “That’s awesome that somebody that’s that high of university status would still be participating in youthful activities.”
LaDuca has made memes since 2010. Sometimes called Dr. Meme, meme lord and the "meme king," according to rate my professor, LaDuca said he has always had a thing for odd visual humor, which accounts for his love of memes.
“I’ll play around — I love them, I love memes, I love making jokes,” LaDuca said. “I think if I weren’t a professor I’d probably be eking out a living in a comedy club circuit somehow being a bad comedian.”
LaDuca said he took over the MSU Facebook memes front between 2011-12 because the old Facebook memes page, MSU Memes, had gone through some changes.
“You know, there was a lot of good stuff and then it got taken over by some sort of spammer,” LaDuca said. “I started MSU Memes 2.0 and a lot of the fun people came over, we’ve almost got 3,000 people in the group now.”
The page has brought forth some avid meme makers like Lange.
Lange said he first became somewhat meme famous for printing out a photograph of Michael Phelps with a sign that had been photoshopped to say, “Harbaugh killed Harambe” and passing them out to people.
There was such a demand for the meme that Lange created a GoFundMe that raised $15 for the printing cost after he printed about 250 copies.
“It just clicked in my head as something that was funny and something I could spread around on Facebook and Twitter and various social media,” Lange said.
Lange said he was recently added to the MSU Memes 2.0 page when someone tagged him in a post and told him they were his people. He said college students like memes because they are entertaining and relatable.
One of his more popular memes used “Forrest Gump” as the example, Lange said. In the meme, Forrest Gump is pictured running in front of Akers Hall with the caption, “When you have to walk to Akers from Brody.”
“I guess it’s just something that’s really relatable because people walking from Akers to Brody know how tough it is to get,” Lange said.
Chemistry junior Brianna Lemon said she had to turn off the notifications from the page because it was becoming too distracting. She said the memes posted by LaDuca piqued her interest the most because they often had to do with chemistry and she could connect with them.
“I kind of like school memes,” Lemon said. “Just like the student ones that kind of relate to how you are, how you feel about school and life in general.”
LaDuca said that he uses memes to connect with students and uses them as a teaching method.
“I will make memes to help my students avoid common mistakes,” he said.
An example for LaDuca included a meme of Batman and Robin, with Batman slapping Robin for attempting to make a fundamental chemistry mistake.
LaDuca said that he is so involved with memes he dressed as a meme last year for Halloween. He said he went as “the Most Interesting Man” meme, which required him to dye his hair gray and carry around a bottle of Dos Equis. He said he plans to be a meme this Halloween as well, but that it’s a surprise.
