Dubbing memes: which clips actually work

Dubbing memes is the obvious thing to do with a dubbing game and the thing most first rounds get wrong. A group picks the funniest clip they can think of, plays it, and the round falls flat — not because the clip was not funny but because it was the wrong shape. A meme is built to land in six seconds on a phone. A round needs something to perform.

After a few hundred rounds a pattern is hard to miss: three properties decide whether a clip plays, and none of them is how funny the clip is on its own.

Thirty to ninety seconds

Under thirty seconds there is nothing to act. You get two lines, the round is over before anybody has settled into a voice, and the playback is four versions of the same six seconds — which is less funny each time rather than more.

Over about ninety seconds the arithmetic turns against you. Five people means five playbacks, so a two-minute clip is ten minutes of watching before anybody votes, and the room is checking their phones by the third version. The sweet spot is a scene long enough to have a middle and short enough to watch five times.

Two or three speakers, not one and not six

A monologue is a solo, and a solo means everybody in the room performs exactly the same thing with nothing between them. It can work — a famous rant is a good stress test of how far somebody will commit — but it is a narrower game than it looks.

Two or three speakers is where it comes alive, because now the room is cast. Somebody gets the one with all the lines and somebody gets the one who says four words, and the four-word part is very often the one that wins the vote. Above four speakers a room has to double up, and a performer switching between two voices every other line is doing an impression of a busy afternoon rather than a character.

A turn in the middle

The single best predictor. A clip where somebody's mood changes — calm to furious, confident to caught out, an argument that resolves or collapses — gives a performer something to play toward, and gives the room something to compare between versions. Everyone hits the turn differently and that difference is the whole vote.

A clip with no turn is flat however good the lines are. Everybody does the same energy for forty seconds and the versions differ only in accent, which is a much thinner joke than it seems while you are picking the clip.

One rule that is not about shape at all: the clip has to be yours to use. Your own footage, your own recordings, anything openly licensed, anything you hold the rights to. Bringing your own video is what the game is for, and it is also why the game cannot clear the material for you.

Subjects that reliably play well

The public library is the fastest way to see the pattern rather than take my word for it — every scene in it lists its length, how many speakers it has and whether any of them talk over each other, so you can pick by shape instead of by memory. These are the subjects with the most in them:

The clips that never work

• —Music. If the joke is the song, dubbing it removes the joke, and the backing you are performing over is doing all the work.
• —Anything under fifteen seconds. There is no round in it.
• —Heavily edited compilations. Cuts every two seconds means lines that start and stop with nothing to act between them.
• —Clips where the joke is the caption. If the funny part is text on screen, everybody reads it, nobody performs it, and the dub is beside the point.
• —Something nobody in the room has seen. Half the pleasure is knowing how the line is supposed to go, and hearing somebody get it wrong on purpose.

Picking one in about a minute

Open the library, sort by most played, and look for a scene between thirty and ninety seconds with two or three speaking parts. Every scene page says whether any of its lines overlap, which is the one detail that decides how many people you need — overlapping lines cannot be covered by one person reading both parts, and a scene without them can be split however you like.

The clip you are most excited about is usually not the one to open with. Start with something two people argue in for forty seconds, and save the one you have been quoting all week for round three, when everybody has found their voice.