Seriously, was Lori Lightfoot funny? A look back at the memeing of the Chicago mayor

CHICAGO — Someday, in the distant future, when you think back on the single mayoral term of Lori Lightfoot, when the name comes up and you hadn’t heard it much lately, what do you think you’ll remember? Any specific image? Or something closer to a mood? Set aside feelings of heartbreak, betrayal, admiration, animosity.

Just form an image in your head.

My brain goes straight to those lighthearted Lori Lightfoot stay-at-home memes that spread virally in the early days of the pandemic. But it’s nudged out by a different image: the Census Cowboy.

Who remembers the Census Cowboy? (Anyone?)

Mayor Lightfoot introduced him at a news conference during the summer of 2020. He was created to encourage Chicagoans to fill out their census forms. It was not the stupidest idea ever: You see a cowboy riding a horse through your neighborhood, you wonder what’s going on, then you slap your forehead: “Oh! I need to fill out my census!”

Makes total sense.

The Census Cowboy was introduced on a horse. He trotted out to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” waving a “Census 2020″ flag. His name was Adam Hollingsworth, aka the “Dread Head Cowboy,” who went viral himself riding into George Floyd protests on horseback; last year he pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and received a year in jail. But back in 2020, now enshrined on YouTube and Facebook, the mayor looks all in, leaning into the silliness of the initiative, a clear attempt to make something so incongruous, it goes viral. “If you see the Census Cowboy coming to your neighborhood, that’s not a good thing!” she says. “That means you need to step up and do your part and fill out the census.” The applause sounds more confused than delighted. The mayor wears a lime-green cowboy hat and the smile of someone whose very best joke is not landing.

I could explain why the Census Cowboy never quite caught on like the “Stay Home, Save Lives” memes, but it would be akin to the famous E.B. White caution: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”

A better question, now that Lightfoot’s leaving office Monday, is:

Was Lori Lightfoot funny?

Or were her attempts to go viral a cautionary tale to politicians who embrace memes?

Wee Yang Soh is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago who has asked his students to select and dissect several political memes, “because, really, they are the emergence of a new language.” What scant research exists on the relationship between politics and memes has yet to scrape the surface, he said. “But it’s already clear for someone like Lori Lightfoot, or any politician, a meme is a tempting, quick way to make someone’s policies or ideals more palpable and relatable to a broad public. Still, it’s also political communication done so loosely that any attempt at going viral can be viewed as pandering. Which could do damage and chip away at a politician’s image.

“The bottom line is kind of like a warning: Effects are highly varied.”

The stay-at-home memes that partly defined the first year of Lightfoot’s term were a confluence of good timing and counter-intuition. If the pandemic fog has weakened your cultural recall, some context may help: As COVID-19 spread in March 2020, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued statewide stay-at-home orders. Except Chicago likes its lakefront too much. So within days, the mayor warned that she would shut all parks and trails if Chicago didn’t “abide by the order.” She looked visibly agitated by the casualness of her constituents. She grew stern: Stay home, do not congregate and “do not let the warming weather let your guard slip.” Chicago police could issue fines for large gatherings.

The mayor was watching.

Within days, Lightfoot’s image, pulled from news conferences — diminutive, arms tucked around a folder, holding a do-not-test-me stare, wearing dark baggy suits that bunched up around a pair of Keds — began circulating on Twitter and Instagram in clever, funny collages: Lightfoot standing on a police sawhorse at the lakefront, warning: Thou shall not pass. Lightfoot’s face superimposed on the Bat-Signal. Lightfoot on top of Willis Tower and in the Chicago River. Lightfoot giving Channel 7′s seven-day outlook (forecast: home). Lightfoot holding a Pennywise balloon at a Red Line station. Lightfoot inside an empty Edward Hopper “Nighthawks” diner and glaring at parasol-carrying picnickers in Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” (both Art Institute of Chicago attractions). My favorite: Lightfoot in a refrigerator, noting, “You just ate.”

At first, Lightfoot seemed surprised and uncertain how to respond, but on the advice of her new chief marketing officer Michael Fassnacht, she recognized a compliment. Or perhaps, a branding message: This mayor did not suffer fools and meant what she said. (Fassnacht declined to comment for this article beyond confirming he asked her to embrace the memes. Mayoral transition is too “sensitive” a time to elaborate, he said.)

At that moment of anxiety, Chicago laughed and passed around those memes, beyond the Midwest. The jokes lent both a charm and some degree of warmth to Lightfoot at exactly a moment when many Chicagoans were still feeling out touch with the mayor. The Tribune slapped her watchful cutout atop its front page masthead, to encourage social distancing. The Washington Post, improbably, placed her in a long lineage of Chicago comedians, alongside Stephen Colbert, John Belushi, Bill Murray and Tina Fey. Even the City of Chicago’s Twitter account shared a cardboard Lightfoot watching from behind the curtains of a Portage Park bungalow. For a new mayor, memes sold her authority.

Plus, on Etsy and elsewhere, it even looked a little cute. Lightfoot in that familiar rigid stance and stare began to appear on stickers, coffee mugs and Christmas ornaments.

The Lightfoot administration, in turn, embraced comedy.

There were videos of the mayor putzing around home during lockdown, watching reruns of the White Sox’s 2005 World Series game. There was a news conference in an empty Soldier Field to underline the dual meanings of her social-distancing warning: “We are not playing.” At Halloween, Lightfoot wore a black mask, a Clorox sandwich board and a red cape with “Rona Destroyer” stitched across the back. At news conferences, she would respond to critics with stand-up-ready bluntness, sending a caustic two-word message to Donald Trump and, when White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called Lightfoot a “derelict mayor,” Lightfoot tweeted: “Hey Karen. Watch your mouth.”

The problem was, the more she did, the more she seemed to be trying to be funny.

And one of the truisms of the digital age is that a laugh that goes viral is often a laugh that’s organic, even random. One of the most popular political memes circulating right now is a nonpolitical sketch from Netflix’s “I Think You Should Leave.” A hot dog-shaped car crashes into a store. Comedian Tim Robinson (a Second City alum) is dressed as a hot dog. He stands with startled customers and insists they find the driver. Obviously, it’s you, they say. Robinson, face buried in his hot dog suit, looks shocked, hurt, set-upon.

Anne Libera, longtime director of comedy studies at both Second City and Columbia College, is not surprised that sketch is used as a political parable. “Tim’s joke resonates so much because he has a thing for characters who refuse to acknowledge truth, and a refusal to admit what’s clear to everyone feels almost tailored to our political moment.”

She thought the Lightfoot administration’s grasp of humor was “brilliant” — at first. “My theory of comedy requires three things: recognition, pain and psychological distance. The (stay-at-home) memes mitigated pain and made the moment less scary.” They were both serious and a reminder that laughter can help a hard situation. “I remember thinking this was exactly how government should use comedy. The thing is, as the pandemic went on, and the George Floyd protests began, a lot of people showed they had little distance from the pain, then jokes look inappropriate.” It’s hard to use satire to back a proudly authoritarian image when Chance the Rapper is tweeting out: “Please stop sending huge groups of militarized police into our neighborhoods exclusively.”

A meme, at its core, is about repetition. In fact, it’s a French word that means (roughly) “same.” It implies some agreement. The concept of memes, however digital now, was initially passed through written language, often acting the same as they do online. Memes — officially, anonymously and critically — became ideal bedfellows for politics. Both prosper through repetition. A meme suggests a person who agrees with it belongs (and excludes a person who doesn’t). The phrase “the American Dream” is a meme. But so is “Stop the Steal.” It is a concise thought representing more. As were those images from the 2012 Republican National Convention that showed Clint Eastwood addressing an empty chair. Memes can be hateful (Pepe the frog), slyly supportive (Bernie Sanders at President Biden’s inauguration, masked and bundled in a coat and mittens) or, more commonly, full of snark: That sigh of disappointment in “Thanks, Obama ...” is a meme; so is the anger in memes that connect Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with the Zodiac Killer.

Lightfoot looked made for such a medium, Libera said. “She has a unique face, she’s deadpan — both work for comedy. That stiffness comes across funny. But doesn’t offer much room for her to make fun of herself.”

As her term played out and the pandemic ground on, the intensity that looked so charming when edited onto The Bean began to support a creeping reputation for inflexibility, contempt and disdain. Lisa Beasley, a Chicago comedian, took offense at Lightfoot’s simply moonlighting as a funny person. “I wanted her to be a mayor; now she’s trying to do my job?” Beasley asked. Irritated, Beasley went viral herself, playing Lightfoot as a scratchy-voiced hypocrite in a popular video series on YouTube, quietly asking Alexa for help with balancing the city budget and making a PSA that demanded nonsensical Chicago Public School changes.

“I thought of it as textbook satire, but it was like she was almost writing for me at times,” Beasley said. “Police reform, city budgets — it’s all on her desk and she’s putting out sketches. She seemed to forget she’s doing this in a community that knows its comedy.”

Jennifer Grygiel, a social media professional and professor of communications at Syracuse University who studies online culture, noted how tenuous it can be for a politician who embraces their own memes: “If you don’t want to see someone like Lori Lightfoot elected to office, standard qualities — postures, expressions — get flipped into memes. It wouldn’t take much to veer into stereotypes like the Angry Black Woman.”

Indeed, some of the most common memes critical of the mayor are cruel. The mayor herself called a meme tweeted by the Chicago Teachers Union “clearly racist”; it showed Scooby-Doo and friends unmasking a white police officer and finding Lightfoot.

“Politicians have an aura around them,” Grygiel said. “Memes have become a way of conceptualizing it, shaping how people perceive and imagine them, usually without really knowing them. They distill. I like to see a lot of political memes as starter packs.”

Wee Yang Soh at the University of Chicago thinks of them as an inside joke, flattering to some, alienating to others. The creator of Chicago Teachers Memes, an Instagram account started by a Chicago high school teacher to support teachers — who asked to retain the anonymity of his work, but also fears retaliation from City Hall — sees his own memes “as kind of this 21st-century version of a political cartoon. I can’t draw but I can use Photoshop, and it’s not a bad tool if you want to influence young people to vote.”

He’s taken on Lightfoot’s education policies. When the election became a runoff without the incumbent, he turned to candidate Paul Vallas, using a series of memes to compare him at times in culturally savvy, albeit superficial, ways with Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson: Vallas puts ketchup on his hot dogs, Johnson does not, and so on. “It’s definitely harder to explain nuance (in a meme),” he said, “but it works if you target the essence.” He points out that some of his work had 100,000 views; couple that with Beasley campaigning for Johnson, he believes memes helped to influence the election.

The actual effect of memes on politics, however, remains unclear. Still, as a path to Gen Z and younger millennial voters, many politicians have wasted no time stumbling in. When former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried running for president in 2020, the notoriously unrelatable billionaire paid a collective of meme makers to attract young voters. It looked desperate. But he wasn’t alone. As the pandemic slowed in-person campaigning, politicians turned increasingly to meme consultants. Last year, during its successful reelection bid, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s campaign placed him in lightly-satiric memes mimicking the latest Taylor Swift album cover. It also wasn’t shy about embracing edgier meme accounts like Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker.

Natalie Edelstein, a senior political communications adviser to Pritzker, said the campaign never had a conversation about whether memes would be too risky, but they did wonder if some memes “felt authentic and consistent with core campaign values.”

When the stranger ones made by outside creators unassociated with the campaign worked, “it was because they were separate,” she said. “If we’d done them, it wouldn’t have had the personality.” She thinks a smart, short meme can sell complicated ideas better than a lot of politics can. But get it wrong and a candidate looks out of touch. “We would never try and look funny,” she said. “A politician wades into territory that isn’t organic to them, the internet turns on them and they end up making people feel weird.”

That’s why Beasley, even after Lightfoot leaves office, plans to occasionally revive her Lightfoot impersonation. She wants to remind public servants to leave satire to comedy professionals and the occasional White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Lori Lightfoot’s four years as mayor of Chicago only reminded her that she doesn’t look to politicians “to try and show me how cool and funny they may be. I wanted Lori Lightfoot to show me how cool she could be with police reform. She thought comedy would make her relatable and personable, but really, I just wanted her actions to be personable.”