Using Prince Louis for a cheap laugh online is no joke

As parent to an excitable four-year-old, I nodded knowingly at the many, many memes of the youngest member of the Cambridge family, howling with hands over his ears, placing a hand over his mum’s mouth and pulling a range of faces — all pretty normal pre-school behaviour, now served up as entertainment on social media and beyond.

Not since Joey from Friends was deemed to look like an Irish uncle has there been such a proliferation of new memes around one subject. But just as those tropes swiftly lost their entertainment value for me, so too did the ones with William and Kate’s kids.

Meme culture is a strange thing. It’s a shorthand, and one that invariably relies on a visual gag for quick laughs. But the punch-line is never in on the joke. If you take the Matt le Blanc example, as good natured as they may have been, many of the jokes revolved around his appearance, in a photo taken off guard.

No matter how much consumers of these memes might cry ‘we’re only having a laugh’, you always have to wonder how funny the person unwittingly providing the entertainment would find it.

Particularly when it comes to children.

There’s a child’s face meme that I used regularly on Twitter, usually when I’d sneaked into my husband’s phone to post something uncharacteristic from his own (mostly serious and work-focused) social media account. It’s the impish grin of Kailia Posey when she starred in Toddlers & Tiaras aged five. When I type ‘smile’ into my Twitter gif options, she’s still one of the top options, but I don’t want to use it any more.

Last month, Kailia died from suicide aged 16, with friends saying she had been struggling with her mental health before her death. It just feels exploitative and wrong now to have her immortalised as ‘Grinning Girl’ and used for easy laughs online when her own interior life was clearly troubled.

Then there’s ‘Success Kid’, 11-month-old Sam Griner with his pudgy fist clenched and look of pure determination on his face. You’ve definitely seen it — he’s been used in marketing campaigns everywhere for more than 10 years.

Now a teenager, Sam’s mum says he’s “just really embarrassed by it, sadly” oh, and she also had to step in to stop his photo being used to raise money for Steve King, a right wing congressman notorious for his white identity politics.

Wills and Kate obviously won’t see any income (nor indeed do they need it), but the monetisation of kid memes adds an extra layer of discomfort to the whole concept.

There’s now a growing cohort of ‘Meme mums’ intent on extracting viral content from their tots in pursuit of financial windfall.

And it’s not an impossible dream — just last year ‘Side Eyeing Chloe’ (an image of two-year-old Chloe Clem looking perplexed as her parents revealed a surprise trip to Disneyland) was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT) for €60,000 to a Dubai-based music company.

I’ve put my own children on social media, I’ve even had them in this paper, so I’m on shaky ground when it comes to protecting their privacy, but there’s something specifically about kid memes that just doesn’t sit well with me.

Possibly it’s because it can get nasty so fast. In the States in 2014, a 16-year-old shop assistant, ‘Alex from Target’ became an internet sensation, even ending up on Ellen, after a covert image of him was shared on social media. First came the adulation, then came the death threats, eventually the teen was afraid to leave his house.

We might think they look funny, that it’s a harmless laugh and sure they’re in the public eye anyway, but ultimately, if a child isn’t in on the joke, then isn’t it perhaps better just to leave it.