I recently did a presentation at work that included talk about the Oxford Comma. In the presentation, I included some memes to make the presentation a little bit funny, and because funny helps people learn.

In my quest for memes I came across this… thing:

Oxford Comma Meme "We invited the Church Representative, Raymond Teller and Penn Jillette." with a picture of penn and teller.
Oxford Comma Misconceptions

Let’s talk about this meme. This is just WRONG.

First, the phrase “church representative” does not need to be capitalized. People love to capitalize random things, but if you’re going to make a grammar meme, you should totally do it right, don’t you think?

Now, let’s get to the meat of the theme, the use of the Oxford Comma. In no way, shape, or form is this meme a good example of when to use the Oxford Comma (OC), nor is it a good example of why one should not use the OC. The “church representative” is not one of the “things” in the list, so this list does not consist of a serial list, which is three or more items. Here’s the

Ox·ford com·ma
noun
a comma used after the penultimate item in a list of three or more items, before ‘and’ or ‘or’ (e.g. an Italian painter, sculptor, and architect ).
Let’s look at the first sentence in the meme:
We invited the Church Representative, Raymond Teller and Penn Jillette.
Since “Church Representative” is not a proper noun, let’s take it lower case:
We invited the church representative, Raymond Teller and Penn Jillette.
Now let’s talk about the items in the imaginary “list”. In the scenario, Raymond Teller and Penn Jillette are both church representatives. Both. Two. Plural. Here’s the second place where the author of this meme goes wrong in assuming that an Oxford Comma is a valid option. Here’s how the sentence should read:
We invited the church representatives, Raymond Teller and Penn Jillette.
There are two representatives, and they did not pluralize the word that describes Mr. Teller and Mr. Jillette.
To summarize, the list only consists of TWO items, Raymond Teller and Penn Jillette. The comma in the sentence serves to indicate that you are starting a list of the representatives, but without that s in representatives, you don’t really know that.
Aside from that point, Mr. Teller and Mr. Jillette are known professionally as “Penn and Teller”, and the sentence puts them in a different order, which kind of hurts my brain, so I’ll make one more change to the sentence:
We invited the church representatives, Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller. 
There. That’s so much better! Now we must delete the meme from the Interwebz!
If you’re going to start a meme, you really should know what you’re talking about. Also, I very much doubt that Penn Jillette will never be a church representative.

Teller knows how to laugh

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