Tank Sinatra, known in real life as George Resch—a US-based social media and marketing consultant and content creator—is clearly not your regular amateur meme creator, posting once or twice a month. Active on his Instagram account since 2011, he has shared close to 9,300 posts and attracted millions of followers; and that’s just Instagram alone.
While on The Ellen Show, Tank Sinatra revealed the reason behind the moniker, keeping it short and to the point: “I’m huge and I have blue eyes, that’s it.”
He then continued to share how he got into the meme world, saying that he has always been a huge fan of comedy, and when the captioned images started gaining popularity, he tried his luck at it in his free time.
“I was selling fence in Long Island, and I was good at sales, so I had a lot of free time; and I would just drive around in between appointments, I would find pictures and I would put these captions to them—I’d see pictures that would remind me of something that happened in my life, and I would just write a caption. It started to get really big really quick.”
In an interview with Writing Routines, Tank discussed the process of creating memes, revealing that for him, it’s more of a catch-as-catch-can kind of deal. “Mainly I’m out there living my life, being a husband, dad, employee, friend, patron, etc. While I’m out there living, sometimes things happen that I think would make a great meme,” he said.
“In other cases, I’ll scroll through some pictures on Reddit and see something that speaks to me. Then I’ll try and imagine some kind of emotional backstory for whatever emotion I think is being expressed by the subject in the picture.”
The mastermind behind one of the most popular meme pages out there also shared that he tries to find the middle ground between posting something he finds funny and something his followers likely would. “To maintain that balance, sometimes I’ll do a generic caption with a cute puppy or something like that, but for the most part I like to stay true to myself and my sense of humor,” Tank told Writing Routines. “My hope is that instead of getting 100,000 ‘meh’ reactions, I’ll get 50,000 ‘oh my god, this guy is so funny’ reactions.”
Unsurprisingly, the humorous quality of memes is the main reason people tend to share them. Surveys revealed that roughly three-in-four respondents share memes for humor, 53% use them as responses, and just over one-fourth turn to memes in situations when words are insufficient, reportedly often engaging in entire conversations based on memes.
Anyone who’s ever “stepped foot” into the online world has likely noticed just how widespread memes are. According to Instagram, in 2020, more than a million posts with the word ‘meme’ were being published on the platform each day.
For Tank, the popularity of internet memes was arguably a life changing phenomenon. What started with him coming up with memes in between fence-selling appointments, grew to not only one of the most successful meme pages online, but other significant achievements, too. In 2017, the meme expert published a book Happy is the New Rich: (And 207 Other Lightbulb Moments) and in 2022, Tank even released his own board game, titled ‘Influencers in the wild’.
According to StrawPoll’s data, Tank Sinatra is currently the fourth most popular meme page online; and he seems to be putting his popularity to good use. In addition to his original account, the content creator eventually launched ‘Tank’s Good News’ focused on the good that’s happening around the world, so people could enjoy a pick-me-up or a boost of positivity.
Not only that, in a collaboration with the New York Islanders hockey team, Tank worked on creating merchandise, which would benefit onewhale.org, an organization dedicated to saving and relocating a much-beloved beluga whale, Hvaldimir.