Paying Respects to Press F

I.

“One of my teachers recently passed away, and I wanted to make a little joke at his funeral… and say Press F to pay Respects. Would that be rude?” began a question on Reddit. 

Fellas, is it rude to eulogize a teacher with a video game meme? Is it rude to dunk on Call of Duty before the bereaved?

“Yeah, best not to meme at a funeral,” one Redditor replied.

“Saying it quietly to yourself would be fine, I guess,” said another. “The whole reason it ever became a meme at all was that it was so out of place for a supposedly serious moment. Don’t bring that into a situation that’s actually serious.”

The cultural legacy of the 2014 video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is a single meme of its most awkward moment, and a ceaseless discourse over whether the meme can be both funny and a sincere gesture of grief. “If you use F in real life, you suck”; “Honestly prefer F to RIP because life and death should be something to laugh with since it affects us all”; “If I died and I didn’t get some Fs I would be kinda disappointed.”

More thought has been given to this question of decorum than to the creation of the Call of Duty moment itself. “I don’t remember whose idea it was, really,” Advanced Warfare level designer Steve Bianchi told me. “It was not something that we really put a lot of thought into.”

“I’m pretty sure it was me, and I'm pretty sure that I wrote it,” says Advanced Warfare creative director Bret Robbins. “I’m the guy. I’m really the guy that was responsible for it.”