I've just had to explain to my non-native friend (which, if you are reading this, I'm sorry and hi but this is too funny not to share) Jerma humor, because they didn't grow up with the same media I did and are still kind of "out of the know" when it comes to some of pop culture history I took for granted.
It is incredibly funny to try and explain why Jerma simultaneously is so many different things and has such a vast reach and how what makes Jerma humor funny is in large part the internet itself.
It's just such a strange kind of humor because he has so many different ways people have found out about and engaged with him. Be it through when he was a tf2ber, through the memes of him being mentally deranged, through the fake things people make which could be seen as real if you don't know him, to the occasional animation of his shenanigans, to actually watching his streams.
The humor of Jerma memes is only possible because the internet is a massive game of telephone and because the community around him is 100% aware of this fact.
The entirety of the humor that surrounds Jerma is that he's been around so long, the expectation of prior information and/or the lack thereof. Jerma memes are funny because it's simultaneously easy to recognize Jerma if you've been exposed to him but, much like my friend who didn't grow up with the same internet I did, it's also easy to be fooled and think that Jerma really IS some guy's pilot, or that Jerma really IS a deranged murderer. Sometimes the point is that you don't know it's Jerma at first, then you finally scroll down past the engaging and realistic story to see the attached image, and you go: "WAIT THATS JERMA!". Then all that immersion is shattered, because the tonal shift from a touching or dark story to fucking JERMA is so hard to get with anything else since he simultaneously juxtaposes and fits in so much.
There's also the obvious fact that Jerma is funny, same with his chat. It's really easy to make Jerma memes because he fits so well in the "Black caption on a white header above an image/video" format which is so easy to mass produce. Meanwhile the more skilled memelords and animators have a vast well of content and inspiration to draw from such as all his greenscreen stuff and different out of context quotes from streams. Jerma has engineered the perfect storm of appealing to the exact people who go out and spread his image, intentionally or not.
Man I just spent the last 445 words of my life overanalyzing Jerma.
