The New Barbie World?

Since we've been talking about memes and meme culture a bit this past week, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss a meme in my lead blog post. So I began scrolling through the Instagram explore page for inspiration. I saw many clever memes, amusing vines, and witty tumblrposts that I'd already seen before, but nothing really struck me as new or interesting. Then, I stumbled across something I did not expect: this. A description could not possibly do it justice, so please go take a look for yourself. Anyway, I wasn't sure if this was staged by the account owner or if it was an actual scene from something, so I did a little research. What I found was even funnier that the meme itself: there's an actual, real-life mini-series on YouTube called "The Most Popular Girls in School" which follows the daily lives of... Barbies. Yes, you read that right. This hilariously unnerving hybrid of Gossip Girl and Keeping Up with the Kardashians is a stop-motion comedy, narrated largely by males. It is hypersexual, vulgar, offensive, derogatory, and just plain bizarre.

         Naturally, I got sucked in right away. I watched episode after episode, chuckling away, until I realized that a few hours had passed… Then, like any good member of the 4:00 pm MWF First Year Writing Seminar “Why Are You Laughing?”, I began to ask myself just that. Here I am, an adult woman, losing hours of her day to an animated series about bitchy Barbies. Naturally, I began to consider how the theories we’ve discussed might apply to this particular situation, and narrowed it down to the superiority theory, the incongruity theory, and the benign-violation theory.

         Firstly, the superiority theory. This show is about 30% satire of a reality TV show, and there’s even a spin-off called Keeping Up with the Van Burens, focused on one Barbie family of especially nasty sisters… Sound familiar? I believe this aspect is funny not only because the characters act superior over one another – as much as I hate to admit it, their degrading marks to each other are pretty clever and well thought out – but also largely because the audience feels superior over all the characters of the series. Just like watching a reality TV show with real families’ lives being documented, the audience gets a kick out of seeing these people in their most vulnerable or exposed states, and we feel like we’re above them somehow. Even though “The Most Popular Girls in School” cast is a bunch of dolls, they act the way catty teenagers generally act, so I believe that we interpret their behaviors as inferior to our own, or even see our past, high-school selves in their characters and laugh at the former, more immature versions of ourselves.

         Next, there are many shocking elements of the show that can support the incongruity theory, like the fact that the dolls’ facial expressions never change: they’re hitting you with that soft smile even while they’re cussing out poor Rachel Tice. And the main characters are quite obviously voiced by males, which is so off-putting at first that you cannot help but laugh in disbelief (you get used to it eventually). But most of all, as I said earlier, we can probably see a bit of our younger selves in the characters… and at least for me, it didn’t escape my attention that I was watching one of my favorite childhood toys be transformed into the punchline of a racy joke. When I was little, Barbies represented imagination and creativity, and I could sit upstairs for hours, coming up with new storylines for them to act out. And in a sense, I guess that’s exactly what Mark Cope and Carlo Moss were doing when they created this mini-series in the first place. But throwing together a storyline about high-school drama full of explicit content just doesn’t quite line up with my younger self’s go-to of reenacting the Barbie princess movies with my dolls (anyone else??). This incongruity between the perceived use of Barbies and what they’re actually used to portray in the series is very shocking, but somehow works just right.

         This leads me to my last point, which is the reason all this goes together quite well: the benign-violation theory of humor. Everything I mentioned before can probably be considered a violation of social norms. Barbies bullying each other in deep masculine voices would be the first one to come to mind. But there are many others that I haven’t yet mentioned, such as the borderline-pedophilic lunch lady, the excessively foreignized French exchange student who’s actually just from Montreal, the over-the-top physical and verbal abuse between siblings, the youngest Van Buren sister (a first grader) who acts like a pimp and blackmails adults… You get the picture. The show’s messed up. But, although all of these are solidly violations of one thing or another, in the end, they’re just dolls! No one in the show is real, so no one is actually being negatively affected by the show’s events: it’s purely for mindless entertainment! Therefore, these bizarre and off-putting violations are ultimately benign, and we can allow ourselves to be amused by them without guilt.

         I hope that you get sucked into watching some of these episodes, and if you find yourself enjoying them a little bit, don’t worry: now you know exactly why you’re laughing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta move on to season 5.

Watch the original video clip of this meme here (6:35). Feel free to explore the channel too, you won’t regret it! (Okay, you probably will, but that’s fine.)