Living in 1984
Part of a series on Nineteen Eighty-Four / 1984. [View Related Entries]
About
Living in 1984 refers to a comic by political cartoonist Gary Varvel depicting a man hearing about Donald Trump's Twitter account getting suspended and Parler being removed from app stores while turning his calendar and discovering the year is 1984. This is a reference to George Orwell's 1984, which has become a common reference among conservatives while discussing what they believe is censorship. However, the reference has been mocked as ill-fitting by observers, resulting in the Wow, This Is Just Like 1984 meme. Varvel's comic has been used as an exploitable online with users replacing the wife's text.
Origin
On January 9th, 2021, conservative political cartoonist Gary Varvel posted a political comic[1] in response to US President Donald Trump's suspension from Twitter, following the breach of the US Capitol (shown below).
Spread
The comic became subject to exploitable parodies over the following two weeks roughly ten days after it was posted. For example, on January 19th, 2021, Redditor ItalianBall posted a Cyberpunk 2077 edit of the comic to /r/GamingCircleJerk,[2] gaining over 4,400 points (shown below, left). The same day, Twitter user @MRPolands[3] made an edit using a Facebook post telling truckers they couldn't masturbate (shown below, right).
Upon learning that his comic was being used for memes, Varvel told a YouTube commenter he would report the edits of his comic to "his syndicate."
Various Examples
Template
