Texts Gif Quotes

In a pie chart of Nick’s personality, Dad Jokes would be, like, seven of the eight slices. He responds to every text in our family group chat with a GIF from a comedic film that is usually Elf: Buddy the Elf jumping up and down, yelling, “Santa’s coming!” if you’re excited; Buddy the Elf bent over a rabid raccoon—“Does somebody need a hug?”—if you’re sad about something. He’ll make the occasional exception, though. Like, if you texted him that your plane had been hijacked, he’d probably send you the scream face from Home Alone.

My great-grandfather said that all dates began with the same custom. The two people on the date would take turns verbally listing all the TV shows they liked. If they both liked the same show, they’d exchange memes from it. But here’s the thing: GIFs did not exist yet. So instead of texting the other person a funny moment from the show, you would say out loud, “Do you remember the part when…,” and then you would perform the meme yourself, using your face and body to imitate what an actor had said and done. Exchanging memes in person was much scarier than doing it by text, because when you text someone a meme and they don’t respond, you can tell yourself that maybe they liked it but just didn’t have time to text you back. But when you performed a meme with your body and the other person didn’t like it, you would be able to tell, because instead of laughing they would just kind of sadly look away and say, “Yeah, I remember that part.” And you would have to just keep on walking to the restaurant.