The Brief: "Sure Grandma, now let's get you to bed" memes use a stock photo of a grandma and her granddaughter for jokes about people's dated worldviews.
DEEP DIVE
“Sure grandma, now let’s get you to bed” memes highlight how quickly times are changing and how people can feel out-of-touch with the modern world. In the year 2020, when everything has been flipped on its head, even seemingly ordinary statements like “let’s go to the movies” can sound like outlandish pipe dreams.
— gilly 🪐 (@iforgotthefall) September 14, 2020
These image macro memes use a stock photo of an old woman using a walker being guided by a young woman. Captions show the grandma saying something that might be considered delusional by today’s standards, but ordinary a few months or years ago. The granddaughter character dismissively responds “sure grandma, now let’s get you to bed,” suggesting that the grandma character’s comment was a completely unrealistic and absurd relic of the past.
This meme format, which became popular on Twitter and Instagram in September 2020, highlights the feeling that people of all ages can have about the state of the world rapidly shifting. For older Millennials, for example, these memes can showcase how they feel out-of-the-loop compared to their Gen Z counterparts. “Sure Grandma” memes can be used more broadly for jokes about music taste, celebrity mishaps, changing cultural norms, and more. Although these memes use older people as the butt of jokes, they’re typically meant to make fun of young people for their dated viewpoints rather than to directly insult older people as Ok Boomer did.
