#KimJongUnDead trends with absurd memes including from Seth Rogen and James Franco’s flick ‘The Interview’
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un’s health has been a matter of speculation. A Japanese media outlet called Shukan Gendai reported that a Chinese medic sent to North Korea as part of a team to treat the leader believed a delay in a simple medical procedure has left the leader severely ill.
The health expert told the outlet that Kim was rushed to a nearby hospital after he clutched his chest and fell to the ground on a visit to the countryside earlier this month. A CPR was performed on the leader while he was being transported to the medical facility.
And while there has been no official word regarding the dictator’s health from Pyongyang, Twitter has been abuzz with rumors of his death. A hashtag called KimJongUnDead has had almost 50,000 tweets under it (at the time of writing this report) and has been trending all day Saturday, April 25. There is very little actual information (less so, verifiable news) under the hashtag. It is mostly reactions to the rumors of his death.
That a lot of the reactions were humorous and borderline absurd is an expected outcome, when the person in concern is the non-democratic leader of a country where the flow of information is tightly controlled -- both within and that flowing outside. An obvious problem of Twitter hashtags, because they are not case sensitive, is that sometimes, they spell out different words entirely. In this case, a lot of users noted that they thought the hashtag spelled out “Kim Jong Undead”.
A lot of people, however, were also confused given that the hashtag, by the time they saw it, had become an excuse for posting large amounts of ironic and trollishly-poor content. Like one Twitter user shared with a gif of Zach Galifinakis from ‘The Hangover’, saying, “Trying to figure out whether he is dead or alive by memes”.
A lengthy glance at the hashtag provides the inevitable answer that most people tweeting under the tag neither care for the actual news, nor are interested in sharing pertinent information. It is mostly, at this point, a collection of memes about the rumored-dead dictator meeting different people in the afterlife, including Kobe Bryant, Adolf Hitler, his father Kim Jong-Il, and more.
There were also innumerable references to the 2012 James Franco-Seth Rogen comedy, ‘The Interview’, where two journalists (Franco and Rogen) who set up an interview with the North Korean Supreme Leader are then recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.
A sizable chunk of the memes was also sympathetic to the unfortunate doctor under whose care Kim Jong-Un supposedly passed. There were memes about the doctor’s supposed reactions and the doctor’s attempt to escape the country and about how he was public enemy number one in North Korea right now.
And like almost all ironic posts about death and destruction in recent times, the viral dancing pallbearers from Ghana also made an appearance in many tweets. The meme is essentially a video of Ghanian pallbearers dancing while carrying a coffin, almost always set to EDM. In internet lore, these pallbearers have sort of taken the position of the angel of death at this point.
But hiding inside a trove of memes were also images of the leader’s funeral. Many pointed out that photos were really that of his father’s funeral, with Kim Jong-Un’s face photoshopped to them. The many fact-checks did not let this go viral.
No one knows for sure if Kim Jong-Un is dead, or even in a remotely fatal situation. But everyone seems to have surmised that something is fishy. After all, the leader reportedly missed the 88th anniversary of their armed forces, the Korean People's Revolutionary Army, on April 25.