Using rage faces in presentation

TL;DR: If in doubt, leave it out.

In talks, avoid anything that can offend or be misunderstood, especially if you do not know your audience. It is ok to make self-deprecating jokes, but you want to keep the atmosphere somewhere between serious to light (depending), but outside the sentiment of sadness or anger if you do not have political ambitions. Your "angry faces" may be funny, but never underestimate that they may be misunderstood (including people believing that you did have a fall-out with your friend in the preliminaries of this work - you would be amazed at what people can read wrongly into a throwaway remark).

Myself, I am quite happy use caricatures in talks, but spend time choosing them carefully to help to highlight the scientific point, never on a meta-level. People are busy enough trying to understand what you are doing, do not waste their brain power on issues you think are funny, but irrelevant to the matter at hand.

But if you think something can backfire, you are probably right. If in doubt, better one caricature/clever idea less.

Please don't do it.

Look at all the cases of your audience:

• People who know rage faces, and who like them (the minority)
  • Even if they like them in general, they might not like them in a presentation
• People who don't know rage faces
  • For them it will seem odd
• People who know rage faces, and who can't stand them
  • Myself included, I would judge you really hard on why you decided it was a good idea, and I will say you know little about internet culture (judging that you like 9gag, which steals content from everywhere without crediting anyone)

Memes are a shitty form of humor, from experience, and depending on your subject you should apply humor from the improvisation of your presentation (look at good humorous TED talks, or how improvisation theatre works).

I would visit this site before adding rage faces: https://www.reddit.com/r/FellowKids/

The problem with internet culture references is that some people might not get it and that out of those who get it, many might dislike it. This is one reason why people prefer more neutral presentation layouts. Another reason is to avoid sidetracking the core of the presentation. As an example, you don't want attendants trying to figure out how to interpret the emotions those rage faces show and thinking about how they might fit into the context of your research process.

As a rule of thumb, I gauge the level of detail of any non-technical content of my work. If it seems to invite second thoughts or even pause, let alone ambiguity, it is a serious red flag.

In your case, those rage faces ask definitely people to interpret them and put them in some context. As such, I could imagine them in a comic-like presentation, where you literally show the progress of your research as a comic, but that doesn't strike me as very professional. For other purposes, they carry too much detail and food for thought to be useful.

If you do want to include emoticons, memes, etc., I'd advise using simpler, more minimalistic ones.