The term "dank" is often used to describe a meme in which the comedy is excessively overdone and nonsensical, to the point of being comically ironic. Dank memes often contain intentionally added visual artifacts. e.g. excessively poor image quality, color bleeding or extremely saturated and modulated colors, or patterns that indicate that the image has been compressed and decompressed extensively. These artifacts, although artificially produced in dank memes, usually indicated that an image has circulated through many virtual hands and been reposted and modified multiple times. When in video format, dank memes often contain audio artifacts, such as feedback or extremely loud and unpleasant audio, also known as ear rape. Dank memes share many characteristics with the
A E S T H E T I C and youtube poop themes. In fact, "dank" is often used as an umbrella term for these themes and other variations, although it should be noted that the A E S T H E T I C theme usually uses said artifacts to produce pleasant and, some might say beautiful, visual and audio, rather than the
crude humor of
youtube poops and other dank memes. All of these themes share the hallmarks of digital artifacts and
excessiveness to conver irony and comedy.