Meme Analysis

This meme is one of many similar memes that circulated this time last year and in early 2024, poking fun at the fact that Taylor Swift reportedly takes a private jet for flights that are seemingly useless or pointless. This became public knowledge when the news reported that she sued an individual who was tracking her flights. 

The main source of humor for the meme is that Taylor Swift is a very famous celebrity contributing to high levels of CO2 emissions due to her private flights. In response, many variations of this meme began circulating, usually with an image of some sort of aircraft and text describing Taylor Swift taking a jet to do some sort of menial task like going to Starbucks or taking out the trash.

This particular meme is more of a cartoon/drawing style, which is part of what makes its rhetoric stand out. Rather than finding an image and placing text over it, someone had to take time to draw the meme. The image itself is more impactful than the usual memes, considering it showcases a jet plowing through hundreds of people. This meme and its variations are targeted at a wide audience including Taylor Swift fans, football fans, and a general young audience that can be moved to action when the question of the environment and sustainability are introduced to the discourse.

In this case, the text and the visual work together to critique wealth and celebrity status utilizing humor and shock value. Rather than other formats of the meme which might joke about Swift using a flight to retrieve a remote from the table or go to Taco Bell, this meme uses an event she attended in real life (which many people had opinions about, especially concerning her relationship with Travis Kelce) and uses the drawing to exaggerate the fact that CO2 emissions are deadly with the jet literally killing people in the stadium. While the humor of the underlying argument of the meme is effective due to the pop-culture context, the argument itself exaggerates the issue. Exaggeration is particularly effective at conveying a message, especially to a young audience, because it calls attention to an issue while utilizing an aspect of humor that young people can relate to.

Another important detail to note is that much of the controversy at the time surrounding Taylor Swift stemmed not from her pension for private flights, but from the fact that since she is dating Travis Kelce, she attended all of the Kansas City Chiefs games, including the Super Bowl. As a result, many football fans (the majority of which, in this case, were male) spoke out in annoyance of the fact that the NFL would show her on camera, arguing that they were focusing too much on Taylor Swift rather than the game. This gives the memes an underlying context of general distaste from football fans who think she shouldn’t be shown on screen. An additional argument could certainly be made for sexist undertones to much of the “controversy” surrounding Swift, namely that since Taylor Swift began attending football games, more female viewers than ever started watching football or attending the games, since Swift’s attendance brought her own fans to the “sidelines,” as it were. This leads to a larger discourse surrounding capitalism, specifically the fact that the NFL used Taylor Swift’s attendance to gain more viewers and thus, more money, rather than focusing on the game.

While the meme is originally meant to critique the carbon footprint of a wealthy celebrity, it also conveys the message of critiquing a capitalist structure within our own pastimes, which also highlights the sexism involved in the discourse. This meme effectively conveyed this message to young audiences not only because the audience was so wide, but because these are issues that the young audience cares enough about to interact with the meme and create more variations, causing them to circulate more widely on the internet.