On the “Jill Stein Dank Meme Stash” Facebook page, supporters of the Green Party Presidential candidate share bafflingly absurd and occasionally funny “dank memes” about her and the other candidates. Photograph from Twitter / @DankJillMemes

It was around the time when Jill Stein acknowledged the existence of the “Jill Stein Dank Meme Stash” that this surreal election tipped into a new dimension of weirdness for me. The stash is actually a Facebook page where supporters of the Green Party Presidential candidate share enthusiasm for and information about Stein, as well as bafflingly absurd and occasionally funny “dank memes” about her and the other candidates. In late August, Stein’s Twitter account tweeted a picture of her with her hand over her mouth, giggling politely at one of the stash’s popular memes, an old image of a Dave Chappelle character protectively hoarding fistfuls of cash, bearing a new caption: “TRUMP AND CLINTON WATCHING JILL LIKE.” Whether enthusiasts of this Facebook page wield clout as a voting bloc is beside the point. It was one of those strange moments when the stodgy, humorless, official world was acknowledging an insular corner of the underground.

To those who aren’t zealots of this particular stash—and Facebook has plenty of other choice meme repositories—the Stein tweet felt like a blatant ploy to court a young, fringe constituency. But who could blame her for this picture, or a follow-up tweet in which Stein saluted the gorilla Harambe, late of the Cincinnati Zoo, who lives on as a cause célèbre on the Internet? After all, this has been a year when very serious newscasters parsed the origin myths of Pepe the Frog, when Donald Trump took to Twitter while most Americans were asleep to implore us to seek out a (nonexistent) sex tape, when a semi-legitimate candidate for President was dogged with rumors that he was the Zodiac killer. I feel sheepish admitting that I’ve laughed a lot during these past few months. More often than not, it’s been because Twitter and Vine are some sort of apex of human creativity, and I’ve come across something genuinely funny. But sometimes it’s been purely out of shock, a laugh as a placeholder for anxiety that feels inexpressible.

Memes don’t circulate because they’re true. They circulate because they’re funny. They’re about reappropriating the culture around us and short-circuiting meanings. Maybe at their best, memes bring power or celebrity or influence down to the level of the crowd. Usually they’re just about flinging something against the wall and seeing what might happen next. It’s a function of modern life and its technology that everything serious can be made into something arresting and viral, and with relative ease. One of the notable features of this election cycle has been how the instinct to ridicule the powers that be has drifted from legible political interests, whether it’s party or ideology, toward a purely nihilistic view of the world. A couple of weeks ago, it was reported that the virtual-reality billionaire Palmer Luckey had been quietly bankrolling an online group responsible for generating and spreading anti-Clinton memes of similarly “dank” quality. While Luckey’s stated goal was to get Trump elected, the candidate’s appeal was less about ideas than his ethos of negativity. The broader goal, Luckey explained, was to prove that “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real”—maybe to create something that might be the inverse of Shepard Fairey’s catalyzing “Hope” or “Change” posters. Maybe, Luckey hoped, they could bring the disruptive, trollish possibilities of online mayhem to “real life.”

This nihilistic approach to humor has played an enormous role this election cycle; in fact, the desire to entertain one another online seems to constitute an entire subset of our political discourse. The challenge has been figuring out who’s in on the joke. By the time NBC announced that Alec Baldwin would make a guest appearance on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend, playing Donald Trump, it felt like part of an election-cycle ritual, and a somewhat old-fashioned one at that. Saturday’s season première featured a ten-minute cold open dramatizing last week’s first Presidential debate. Kate McKinnon brought a jagged energy to her portrayal of Hillary Clinton. Baldwin depicted Trump with a scornful enthusiasm. He demonstrated keen observational skills, finding Trump’s timbre, exaggerating all the right mannerisms, hitting on a few of Trump’s key verbal tics, like the accusatory vigor with which he leans into “China.” But given the cycle as a whole, as well as the revelations about Trump’s taxes that dropped a couple of hours before, it felt quaint, a bit too professional, yet far less strange than the real thing.

Making fun of politicians often serves as a release valve, a way to make difficult truths into something digestibly viral. The problem with “S.N.L.”-type parody in a time of Trump is that the truth no longer feels sufficient; it will not set us free. Maybe this helps explain why television’s exasperated, pretend-news anchors are having a tough time keeping pace with real life. Over the past few months, it’s been hard to discern whether Trump’s campaign is a series of disasters and happy accidents or a disinformation drive carefully mapped by a team of semiotics majors. In other words, it’s hard to expose bullshit when the baseline suspicion is that everything is bullshit.

Baldwin’s Trump is unlikely to sway any undecideds away from the Republican candidate, which seemed a clear goal, and the obvious precedent was Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin, in 2008. Back then, Fey shrugged off accusations of editorializing by pointing out that she was often repeating the candidate’s words verbatim. The implication was that hearing Palin’s words askance might reveal something vital to those paying attention. It’s impossible to quantify, of course, what effect any “viral” moment can actually have on the course of history—even more so now, when we have the means to bury those moments under thousands of words of commentary. But if campaigning is about the projection of image, and if modern campaigns are built to capitalize on gaffes, stumbles, and glimmers of visible weakness, Fey’s impression certainly disrupted the flow of things. And it was a reminder that the enormous machine of politics could still get twisted up by the actions of individuals, sometimes by accident. From Baldwin to Luckey, from dank-meme magicians to people cracking wise on Twitter: it’s a shoot-the-moon logic that’s come to define this moment. The possibility that a joke might cohere into a seeming movement. Maybe a joke could even win the Presidency.