Original air date: 3/28/2012
The boys take part in a new, dangerous photographic meme.
Tropes:
- Aborted Arc: The plot with the cats conspiring to wage war against humanity is deliberately left unresolved by the end of the episode.
- Berserk Button: Memes are this for Professor Lamont, so much so he'd force a kid to put a gun in his mouth.
- Black-and-White Insanity: The disgruntled Safe-Ed teacher Professor Lamont not only brings a loaded gun into a classroom full of minors, but he forces Butters to put the gun in his mouth to demonstrate the "dangers" of memeing. As far as we know, he gets away with it scott-free.
- Cats Are Mean: According to the experts, a cat came up with a particularly dangerous meme that gets a bunch of people killed.
- Combat Pragmatist: Stan, Kyle and Cartman pull off the Curb-Stomp Battle below by capitalizing on advantages: Cartman assaults the boy "Taylor Swifting" who was of course sitting on the ground with his pants down, with not much of a chance to defend himself (even though technically he started it), while Stan and Kyle double team the other boy. Debatable with Kenny as he technically faced two by himself, but his opponents clearly didn't want to fight, and probably didn't expect to be attacked at all, so he might have had the element of surprise on his side.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: The "fight" between the Boys and the kids "Taylor Swifting" amounts to a one-sided beat-down that leaves the other group hospitalized, while the Boys are left unscathed.
- Discredited Meme: Used in-universe; the rapid turnover in popularity of Internet memes is taken to absurd extremes, with memes skyrocketing and subsequently plummeting in popularity in a matter of days.
- Disproportionate Retribution: The Boys respond to "Faith Hilling" being replaced by "Taylor Swifting" by delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on a group of kids practicing the latter, to the point that they end up in the hospital.
- Flash In The Pan Fad: The episode skewers the meteoric rise and equally meteoric fall of Internet memes, as well as the often bizarre nature of the memes themselves. A Running Gag develops in which a meme comes out of nowhere to take the Internet by storm, and then runs its course in a matter of days or even hours (but not without claiming lives along the way), at which point another meme takes its place.
- The Internet Is for Cats: The new meme, "cat breading" photos, in which cats are photographed with their faces in the middle of slices of bread... except the cats are the ones posting the photos.
- Karmic Misfire: Butters is the only kid who buys into the safety instructor's hyperbolic fear-campaign, yet the teacher singles out Butters to demonstrate the "dangers" of memeing by forcing him to put a loaded gun in his mouth.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The original idea was an episode satirizing planking, but it went out of style so quickly that it became an episode about memes in general and how quickly the trends come and go.
- Space Whale Aesop: In-universe. According to the educational video shown to the class, memeing will cause you to get hit and killed by a train, even if you're not on train tracks.
- Take That!: Professor Lamont is meant to be every hyperbolic Moral Guardian who try using scare-tactics to dissuade kids from doing things, the comparison to the use of loaded guns being a common simile used for drug-use. At best, the kids see through the fear-mongering and ignore him, at worst they scar kids for life.
- Too Dumb to Live: The problem isn't that memeing is dangerous; it's that these people don't have the sense to move when the train is still miles away from them. In certain cases, though, the oncoming train has struck people from unusual/impossible places.
- Trend Aesop: It's better to stick with something you enjoy after it becomes outdated than give it up to keep following rapidly changing fads.
