It is difficult to determine how many memes there are exactly and which should be considered the very first one. Some internet users believe the Dancing Baby, also known as Baby Cha-Cha or Oogachacka Baby, is what got the ball rolling. Others claim that something as simple as a pre-emoji smiley face—:)—could have easily been considered a meme.
In recent years, people believe to have found what might actually be the first meme ever—a cartoon dating back to 1921, which was then featured in the satirical magazine ‘The Judge’. It’s a black and white image of a two-panel drawing and a caption, reading “How you think you look when a flashlight is taken.” vs. “How you really look.” Based on the ‘expectations vs. reality’ kind of joke, it does resemble quite a few popular memes floating around the online space nowadays.
Even though it’s close to impossible to count all the memes out there, it might be possible to track how many people tend to share them. According to the Amra & Elma marketing agency, three in four people aged 13 to 36 say that they do. Moreover, the agency also revealed that a typical millennial, for instance, views anywhere between 20 to 30 memes a day.
It’s safe to assume that those who view them on a daily basis ought to know their classics, such as Kermit, Doge, and Disaster Girl, just to name a few. However, even those familiar with the meme hall of fame might not know all the stories of where they came from.
Unlike Kermit the Frog—the central character of The Muppet Show—Doge, for instance, was not well known to the general public until it became a meme. The dog in the original Doge meme, a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, became famous when its owner Atsuko Sato took the iconic picture and put it on the internet in 2010.
There is also a cartoon dog—a popular meme used to depict the mood when things get tough and all you can do is try to convince yourself that “This is fine”. Published in 2013, it is a snippet from the webcomic series ‘Gunshow’ illustrated by K.C. Green.
Doge and “This is fine” are far from the only pet-based iconic memes out there. There’s another face beloved by thousands of internet users all over the world despite looking somewhat cranky. Yes, you’ve guessed it right—it’s Grumpy Cat, the feline with a facial expression that speaks louder than words.
As a matter of fact, its somewhat sulky appearance was the result of an underbite and feline dwarfism. However, the face quickly found its way to people’s hearts after the owner’s brother, Bryan Bundesen, posted the cat’s picture on Reddit in 2012.
Another meme that rose to glory thanks to Reddit was the image of Bad Luck Brian, which in reality was Kyle Craven’s photograph taken back in high school, around 2006. In a video for Know Your Meme, Kyle told the story of how he went to buy a silly costume before picture day at school and posed with his buddies laughing around him. That might have been the reason he was asked to retake the photo the following day.
Even though he did retake the picture, the first attempt was uploaded on Reddit by his friend, who told Kyle the next day that he made him “internet famous”. Ever since then, the image of a young man in a sweater vest has been one of the most popular memes, typically depicting an unlucky situation of some sort.
There are numerous other instances of random people becoming internet famous after being made into a meme. For example, Laina Morris and the staring-contest-like gaze into her camera, which earned her the title of the Overly Attached Girlfriend. Or the Disaster Girl, Zoë Roth, who went to see a controlled fire with her dad back in 2005 with no clue how that one day would change her life. A four-year-old kid when the picture was taken, Zoë sold the image as a non-fungible token (NFT) for nearly $500,000 at the age of 21.
“Hide The Pain Harold” is another internet sensation, whose world was thrown upside down after becoming a meme. An engineer for most of his life, András Arató became famous after taking part in a professional photoshoot for stock images. Located in Budapest, he quickly became a world-wide sensation after people started using his portrait, adding witty lines to his somewhat sad facial expression.