At the risk of sounding like a show-off, I’m really good at gifs. Not the pre-packaged kind: there’s no man-blinking-in-polite-disbelief in my repertoire, no woman-in-a-turquoise-top-doing-a-spit-take, and certainly no Ron Burgundy saying: “That escalated quickly.” We’re talking bespoke, artisanal gifs, hand-selected for each occasion. Sometimes, I even make my own, noting down a bon mot or a wry facial expression from a TV show and saving it for a special occasion. Super Hans from Peep Show saying: “The secret ingredient is crime”? It’s not a multipurpose gif, like Homer Simpson backing slowly into a hedge, but that only makes its rare deployment more effective.
There’s only one problem with this, and if you’re gen Y or younger you’re probably already doing a TikTok to explain it to me: gifs aren’t cool any more. Middle-aged people use gifs now. Twitter and WhatsApp have gif search bars that help even the most technophobic users find a little girl having a sugar rush at a baseball game, or Steve Carell yelling: “No!” They’re universal, therefore lame. I don’t make the rules, as Natasha Lyonne says in a gif from a show I haven’t seen. I wish I did.
