“….and they were roommates!” “Oh my god, they were roommates!”
This meme, inspired by a 2014 Vine may have ruled the internet in the 2010s (still is, if we are being real), but surprisingly enough, it’s not the Millennials or Gen Z who were the first to use the term meme. Dating back to 1976, the term meme was originally coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene; whereas today, more than 40 years later, the closest relationship the term has to science is Norman Osborn’s (Spider-Man, 2002) iconic, “You know, I’m something of a scientist myself.” So how did something, that was coined by scientists for an entirely different purpose in the first place, become so commonplace that varieties of it started appearing everywhere- from WhatsApp chats in the form of gifs and stickers to your everyday local advertisement? Let’s take a look.
Funnily enough, it was way before the advent of the internet that meme culture started setting its roots in our society, although, they were not referred to by the same at that time. The word meme basically means, “an idea or element of social behavior passed on through generations in a culture, especially by imitation.” and one of its earliest occurrences was recorded in the form of the palindrome “SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS“. This palindrome, which was originally discovered in the ruins of Pompeii and dates back to 79AD, began to be graffitied across different cultures worldwide in 1979 including England, Syria, Italy and France. The phrase “FRODO LIVES” from Tolkien’s 1954 trilogy “‘The Lord of the Rings” is another such phrase that was made popular among the masses via graffiti, buttons, stickers and the works.
It was only in 1996 that meme culture blew up, all thanks to graphic designer Michael Girard and his CGI Baby Cha-cha. Before that, it was only via email or Message groups or Usenet forums that the exchange of memes in the form of Rage comics, de-motivator, image macro, top text/bottom text and LOLcats took place. However, after Baby Cha-cha, there was no looking back. With 2005 came the launch of YouTube and with it, memes found a new lifeform: videos. Video memes like Turn Down for What, Rickrolling and The Harlem Shake Dance spread like wildfire and became internet phenomena. With platforms like Tumblr and Reddit coming into existence and joining the party, memes had officially ceased to be an internet niche and had bled into the ways and lives of the common masses.
One of the greatest memes however, which came in the year 2012 and started a whole new genre of memes in itself was from Kyle Craven, or as the internet better knows him : Bad Luck Brian. Bad Luck Brian was an instant hit and this peak meme genre of ‘reaction memes’ was quick to give us some viral memes such as Overly Attached Girlfriend, Side-Eye Chloe, Grumpy Cat, Disaster Girl, Distracted Boyfriend, Kombucha Girl and countless others. Memes had officially transcended the language barrier and were not only being circulated amongst the masses for their hilarity, but were being used by multinational companies in their advertisements. It was sometime around this era that a specific subculture called Dank Memes were born.
Like all things bordering on blasphemous and offensive, the term ‘Dank Meme‘ first appeared on message boards within 4chan and Reddit in 2013. What started as a term to describe a joke that was ‘unusual’ or ‘self-referential’ hit its peak in 2015-2016 with Facebook pages like ‘Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash‘ and Instagram pages like ‘Terribly Dank Tales‘ gaining thousands of followers overnight. Over the years though, dank memes, albeit still popular, are now used to describe in-jokes that are intentionally bizarre or have exhausted their comedic value to the point of being trite or cliché. More prominently though, the term has now become a compliment of sorts for people deemed ‘cool enough‘ or having a ‘dark enough‘ sense of humor.
As the dank meme culture grew, memes such as Doge, Drake Reaction and Kermit the Frog grew popular. With the 2010s drawing to a close, everything and anything had the possibility of becoming a meme- be it Bernie Sanders at the Rally or a very specific line from a particular movie or tv series, like the Getting Paid meme from the movie We’re the Millers (2013). Anything and everything, from the most obscure reference to the most slap-stick-on-the-face-joke was a meme- one just had to be imaginative enough about it.
What’s interesting to note here is how something that started just as another mode of recreation quickly took over not just our social media feeds and has weaseled its way into pop culture and our everyday life so much so that it is near impossible to imagine a world without memes. Memes have impacted everything, ranging from society to politics. They were used in Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign, by Delta Airlines in their advertisements, and more recently, who doesn’t know about Dogecoin? Meme culture actually has that big of an impact on us that an actual cryptocurrency was made around it! It’s incredible to just think how much memes have evolved and how far their reach has increased in the past two decades. There’s absolutely nothing today for which there isn’t a meme. And on the off chance that there isn’t one yet, you can be damned sure that someone is already making it as we speak.