In one of his newest videos, Swedish Youtuber PewDiePie, also known as Felix Kjellberg, discussed a meme posted by Behrend student Jaret Kelly. PewDiePie is most well-known for his “original content” and Let’s Play videos. In recent years these have evolved into more commentary on fan generated content while still incorporating a fair amount of gameplay. The image itself was created by Kelly for the Office of Strategic Communication where he is a marketing assistant. His job involves posting to social media for the school and researching trends to ensure messages effectively reach students.

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The video that featured the image was called This Video is for Fellow Kids Only! as a part of PewDiePie’s series of meme reviewing videos focused on specific Subreddits. In this particular case it was r/Fellowkids where users post content from companies or older people trying too hard to seem relatable to young people. In this lighthearted series Felix takes content posted in the Subreddit dedicated to his channel, and discusses the quality and history of a meme in a brief bit on each and rates them. It is not as much about the rating or even quality discussion as it is the entertainment that comes from his commentary and his background editors’ strategic energy. To put it gently, PewDiePie kills memes. It has happened many times that the millions of fans have stopped using certain memes altogether based off of the reaction from their beloved “Pewds” even if he loves the meme. This exemplifies the influence that PewDiePie has as the most subscribed Youtuber and why having a Behrend-related meme shown on his video is so exciting.

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The potential for any subject to be turned into a meme is rather high and really just relies on the creativity of one person combined with others having a shared experience that connects them to a given meme. In this particular case, it was a matter of the Behrend community knowing what the Smith Chapel is and for those unaware of the chapel, they may just enjoy the moth meme which PewDiePie discusses as overused and in this particular case, he nitpicks the font and accents used to make a joke about the “correct” way to generate memes. After speaking with Jaret he seemed excited but surprised to see his post on a PewDiePie video gaining such attention, even if Felix did mock the post. Kelly knew that the satirical content was in good fun. Being in his position with the school, Kelly is tasked with reaching a younger audience and evidently memes are the way to go. He said that he had to run it by his boss and they were rather hesitant but Kelly ensured them “Kids these days need to see memes that are surreal and don’t always make sense” and generally PewDiePie agrees.