The “confused” lady above is one of Brazil's well-known memes. She was actually a character from a 2004 soap opera who kidnapped a baby and killed some people who got in her way | Image: Twitter/Reproduction. You have probably already stumbled upon a Brazilian meme on one of your internet searches and didn't even know it. Do you know the one with the confused blonde lady with complicated formulas in the background? That's a Brazilian meme. Brazil ranks as the fourth country with the highest number of internet users in the world. Portuguese is Brazil's only official language and the majority of its population do not speak English. While most of the internet is decidedly anglophone, Brazilians have carved out a large Portuguese-speaking digital territory of their own. And they mainly use it to speak on their own terms — which means, a lot of memes. The truth is, in order to understand anything about Brazil in 2017, from soap operas and daily news, to politics and the economy, you must take a look at its memes. Brazil takes its memes so seriously that the country launched the 1st Meme World War against Portugal in 2016, after finding out that a Portuguese Twitter user had appropriated a dearly loved meme. Even though memes from any culture can be difficult to explain to outsiders, Brazilian researcher Gabriela Lunardi embraced the challenge. She is a research student at QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Australia and is currently working on a project that, as she explains, “tries to understand why Brazilian memes are different from other memes, how they express specific aspects of Brazilian culture, and why they matter.” “Brazil is very active on the internet, not only because of the number of users, but also because Brazilians have a very specific way of behaving online. […] Brazilians don't care if you don't understand their language and their jokes, they will talk to you — or Katy Perry, or Nicki Minaj — as if you were Brazilian”, Gabriela says in an essay about former Brazilian singer and dancer Gretchen — aka the queen of memes, in Brazil — who recently starred in Katy Perry's Swish, swish lyric video. We talked to Gabriela to understand “why Brazil's memes matter”. Global Voices: Why have you decided to study memes in your dissertation? Gabriela: Meu TCC na graduação foi sobre o canal de YouTube Porta dos Fundos. Eu amei estudar sobre a internet brasileira, então quis investigar mais a fundo a relação entre humor e cultura brasileira online. Sempre achei os memes brasileiros maravilhosos. Eles dizem muito sobre o Brasil, e isso ficou ainda mais claro vim para a Austrália e vi que os australianos tinham um humor completamente diferente do nosso e não entendiam nossos memes. Gabriela: My final paper for my undergrad studies was about a YouTube channel called “Porta dos Fundos” [“Backdoor”, a Brazilian comedy-sketch channel]. I loved studying the Brazilian internet, so I’ve decided to go deeper into the relationship between humor and online Brazilian culture. I’ve always thought that Brazilian memes were wonderful. They say so much about Brazil, and this became even clearer after I moved to Australia and found out that Australians have a completely different sense of humor and had trouble understanding ours. GV: How do Brazilian memes differ from other countries’ memes? Gabriela: Cada país ou região tem memes diferentes, que refletem suas culturas. Os memes brasileiros retratam quem é o brasileiro e como ele lida com a cultura popular, política, e realidade social. Eles são incrivelmente difíceis de entender para quem vê de fora porque temos esse aspecto único que é falar dos nossos problemas através do humor. Uma frase que eu gosto muito de falar para quem não é brasileiro é que “nós rimos pra não chorar”, porque acho que ela descreve perfeitamente esse nosso jeito singular de fazer humor. Gabriela: Each country or region has different memes that reflect their own culture. Brazilian memes portray the Brazilian people and how we deal with popular culture, politics and social reality. They are amazingly difficult to understand, for those seeing them from the outside, because we have this unique way of talking about our problems through humor. A saying that I really like to mention to those who are not Brazilian is that “we laugh so we don’t cry”. I think it perfectly describes our unique way of making humor. I had to log back in on this acc, cause I felt like I was talking to myself on the other acc. pic.twitter.com/j79OCuCP8j — ⛈?? (@FOCCl) June 14, 2017 Cuca is an anthropomorphic alligator villain from the Brazilian children’s television show Sitio do Picapau Amarelo.