meme NEPAL brought laughter into our lives when we felt least like it. In an email interview  with Sharada Adhikari, this group of joke masters reveal how they go about putting a smile on our faces

Room fare now in Kathmandu

1st floor = Rs 20,000

2nd floor = Rs 15,000

3rd floor = Rs 8000

4th floor = Rs 1000

5th floor = Free

Probably none of us can stop from smiling after reading this new room fare — post earthquake and the aftershocks, the value of the upper floors of Capital’s houses seem to have gone down. You might be one of those who would prefer to stay on the ground floor, be it in the corridor of your house rather than ascending to the fifth floor where your well-facilitated room lies. This sentiment of every other Nepali traumatised by the powerful April 25 earthquake and its aftershocks is aptly captured by the aforementioned meme — a creation of meme Nepal, a humour portal.

This and such other memes related to earthquake became quite popular on Facebook after the earthquake thus generating thousands of likes, numerous comments. Most importantly the memes provided comic relief to quake-hit Nepalis. And meme Nepal was one of the meme pages doing that job.

“We feel, through our jokes, we can put smiles on faces of those people — a small smile is a huge thing during such moments,” writes the page’s creator and owner Nirjan Timilsina, currently in the UK to The Himalayan Times in an email interview.

Created on April 27, 2014, the page aims to entertain people through “sarcasm and humour” on varied issues happening in the nation. Most of their posts are based on Nepal and Nepalis — be it the earthquake or Nepali politics or education sector or any other ongoing issue.

And this page trolls and makes fun via meme — a concept or idea that spreads from person to person and goes viral through the Internet. It can be anything — gestures, writing, speech or picture and this group has chosen picture as their medium to express their humour.

Currently a total of six administrators — residing in different parts of the globe are working to create the memes. Sashank Sigdel, Ishowar KC and Bibek Neupane from Nepal along with Prakash Dura and Timilsina (UK), Manoj Sapkota (Malaysia) are the Nepali youth, who taking time out of their daily schedule create those funny memes.

A lot of people were using international pages like 9gag and Meme Center when “we realised there is no pure Nepali meme page” says Timilsina on behalf of his team about starting this meme page.

With the basic theme “less is more”, they usually write a two-liner and clarify it with cartoon faces also called rage faces. This group like most other Nepali and international pages uses the “sketch of a character Yao Ming — a Chinese basketball player” in most of their posts.

For this group, a picture is worth thousand words, that’s why “we chose meme”. In terms of reach also, meme is effective as compared to the use of text only. “People understand what we want to tell them and meme is a trend which is shared virally by people. It is good for our page’s growth as well,” Timilsina writes.

Probably that is why the page that they started with very few followers has crossed over 90,000 fans. “Our followers are mainly Nepali people from Nepal, UK, USA, Malaysia, Germany, India, Kuwait, Qatar and other countries.”

To tickle the funny bone of their fans, the admins communicate through messages about the issues they need to cover. Where do they get the news? “We source reliable news media through Internet” along with social media like Twitter, Facebook pages, Facebook groups. Their followers too keep them up to date about the contemporary issues by sending messages and comments.

Collecting the information, they create memes that are “unique, acceptable, based on current topics, social issues, political subjects but without any racist or discriminatory terms. We create memes acceptable to people of all age groups”.

Nonetheless, they often ban followers who “use vulgar and indigestible words or use fake Facebook account”.

The group, that hasn’t revealed their faces to the fans yet, say they are receiving very positive feedback and describe the moment of seeing their posts in a leading Nepali newspaper along with posts shared by personalities like Rabindra Mishra and Haribansha Acharya as interesting moments.

They proudly call themselves “Nepal’s leading humour portal” revealing upcoming plans like — organising blood donation

programme, tee-shirt printing for charity as well as other social activities with the help of their followers.

During the earthquake aftermath, along with creating the memes that would make you smile, they also provided quake related information — statistics on death and injured, ongoing relief programmes — along with helping Nepalis staying abroad “know the status of their loved ones in Nepal”.

Whatever they do, meme NEPAL says, “What could be the best job other than making others smile and happy. We love what we are doing.”

If you haven’t seen their creations yet, you can follow them on Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/memeNEPALofficial, or follow them on Twitter http://twitter.com/nepalmeme