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MEMES, Part 8: The Scream
If you typed “inauguration” into your web browser anytime between 2017 and 2020, you likely saw, near the top of your search results, an image of a p…
4 years, 11 months ago
MEMES, Part 7: Dead Giveaway
In 2013, four white musicians turned a local TV news clip featuring a Black man named Charles Ramsey into a song and uploaded it to YouTube. The auto…
4 years, 11 months ago
Hallomeme Bonus: Slender Man
When two 12 year-old girls attacked their friend in the woods of Waukesha, Wisconsin in May of 2014, they claimed to have done it to please Slender M…
5 years ago
MEMES, Pt. 6: Call me... The Punisher
The Punisher has always been a complicated Marvel antihero: a man whose creator imagined him as a reaction to the failures of government at home and …
5 years ago
MEMES, Pt. 5: The President of Kekistan
He is known by several names, but Gordon Hurd is the one this man-turned-meme adopted when he fled Cameroon for the UK more than two decades ago. Gor…
5 years ago
MEMES, Bonus: Zoë Didn't Start the Fire
Most of us hate the photos our parents take of us. But what happens when one goes viral?
Zoë Roth was 4 years old when her dad took a photo of her sm…
5 years ago
MEMES, Pt. 4: Woman Yelling at a Cat
Humor is a key ingredient of any unit of culture that morphs and spreads over time. But humor isn’t always there at the beginning. For “Real Housewif…
5 years ago
MEMES, Bonus: A Billion Ricks
Last week, we explored the origin of the “Rick Roll,” a meme that evolved from Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Since the musi…
5 years ago
MEMES, Pt. 3: Gotta Make You Understand
Who gets credit for starting a meme? Usually... nobody -- they're made too quickly and organically. In the case of one of the most famous bait-and-sw…
5 years ago
MEMES, Pt. 2: Scumbag Steve
If there is an OG meme in which a human is the star, Scumbag Steve is it. He spread across the internet like wildfire in 2011 as a universal represen…
5 years, 1 month ago