the only time i saw this snowclone done correctly was about two days after it first became a meme. since then, every single interpolation that I have ever seen betrayed a complete misunderstanding of the structure of the message. like, a fundamental failure in reading comprehension. it's not "(keep calm) and (carry) on." 'carry' is not the verb! "carry on" is a phrase! how does EVERYONE get this wrong? and i think the answer is: there is no joke here. the only one that ever could have been made was made two days after "everyone" became aware of it, and since then hundreds of thousands of people have looked at it and declared that it had "Meme Potential", but took that to mean that anything whatsoever they wrote that could be traced back to the original concept would automatically be a Funny Cultural Reference, and never asked "but does this make any sense?" the above image is gibberish, nobody chuckled at it, and it's been over ten years since this started and it shows no signs of stopping.
My favorite thing about "Keep Calm and Carry On" is that it never happened.
That specific poster was never actually released, and the poster campaign itself was widely reported as a failure. The British gov't printed millions of the damned things, but that specific design was never approved for release, and only made its way to a handful of gov't offices and little else.
Some dude in 2000 found one in a box of old books and saw merch potential, and a million copycats soon followed.
The only thing that slowed it down is that some assmunch business douche who had nothing to do with the bookshop or anything else really, registered the trademark in the EU and started suing everyone else for using it. He tried it in the US and Canada too but it appears both those filings are dead now.
