> If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 up votes.
IANA Literary Anthropologist, but: when you tell a story from your life by itself, you're presumably telling it about you. People don't care about you: they've never met you, and after they read your words they'll probably never hear from you again. They don't have any previous impressions of you to pattern match their expectations against, so nothing you say can make them go "oh, yeah, that's just like her" or "ha, I knew it" or "oh god, it's going to happen to him again, isn't it?"
In the context of an image macro, on the other hand, your story is paraphrased into a sort of shared mythology: there's this one platonic Awkward Penguin/Insanity Wolf/Scumbag Steve, doing all of these things, and acting as a larger-than-life moral symbol of the effects of doing these things in the process. People know what to expect of the character, and so people can seek out these stories when they want something with that "feeling" to it.
Presuming you were living in Ancient Greece, you'd see these same people taking various minor heroic moments from their day-to-day lives, exaggerating a bit, and turning them into stories about Hercules.
(You can do this for a living, too, creating characters from whole cloth who are larger-than-life molds to match up to various day-to-day stories. The result is called a sitcom.)
People genuinely care about stories. A story about a wacky inventor is better than a story about their invention (see everything by Malcom Gladwell). Maybe a meme is better, since you already know the main character.
Or maybe there's a trade-off - a long story needs a new main character, but a short joke works best with a stock character. Compare War and Peace to "little Johnny" jokes.
IANA Literary Anthropologist, but: when you tell a story from your life by itself, you're presumably telling it about you. People don't care about you: they've never met you, and after they read your words they'll probably never hear from you again. They don't have any previous impressions of you to pattern match their expectations against, so nothing you say can make them go "oh, yeah, that's just like her" or "ha, I knew it" or "oh god, it's going to happen to him again, isn't it?"
In the context of an image macro, on the other hand, your story is paraphrased into a sort of shared mythology: there's this one platonic Awkward Penguin/Insanity Wolf/Scumbag Steve, doing all of these things, and acting as a larger-than-life moral symbol of the effects of doing these things in the process. People know what to expect of the character, and so people can seek out these stories when they want something with that "feeling" to it.
Presuming you were living in Ancient Greece, you'd see these same people taking various minor heroic moments from their day-to-day lives, exaggerating a bit, and turning them into stories about Hercules.
(You can do this for a living, too, creating characters from whole cloth who are larger-than-life molds to match up to various day-to-day stories. The result is called a sitcom.)