LopensLeftArm,

When you said meme humor, a couple of Brandon Sanderson (he’s a fantasy author) examples came to mind.

(Very minor spoilers for some of his works follow, reader beware.)

There’s a scene in one of his books where a young woman is talking with her magical spirit companion about doing something “inappropriate” with her new fiancé, and the most inappropriate thing her spirit companion - who is a logic-based abstract entity - can concieve of them getting up to together is dividing by zero. This happens in the Stormlight Archive series, which is several very weighty tomes of high fantasy.

One of his books, which is aimed toward more of a YA audience, is narrated by one of his recurring characters and is just extremely witty, frequently breaking the fourth wall of the story when he himself happens to show up in it as a character off in the background. There’s one passage that I think is a great example of this, it happens when the main character is getting acquainted with all the members of a pirate ship she’s stumbled onto, and they’re talking about all the different crew:

I’m not going to ask you to remember them all. Mostly because I don’t remember them all. Therefore, for ease of both narrative and our collective sanity, I’m going to name only the more important members of the Crow’s Song. The rest, regardless of gender, I’ll call ‘Doug.’ You’d be surprised how common the name is across worlds. Oh, some spell it ‘Dug’ or ‘Duhg,’ but it’s always around. Regardless of local linguistics, parents eventually start naming their kids Doug. I once spent ten years on a planet where the only sapient life was a group of pancakelike beings that expressed themselves through flatulence. And I kid you not—one was named Doug. Though admittedly it had a very distinctive smell attached when the word was ‘spoken.’ ‘Doug’ is the naming equivalent to convergent evolution. And once it arrives, it stays. A linguistic Great Filter; a wakeup call. Once a society reaches peak Doug, it’s time for it to go sit in the corner and think about what it has done.

That one’s called Tress of the Emerald Sea. Fantastic read.

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