In January 2019, a plain photograph of a brown egg was posted to Instagram with a single goal: to become the most liked image on the platform, beating Kylie Jenner's birth announcement photo. No filter. No caption. No celebrity. Just an egg. It got 56 million likes. The account behind it, World Record Egg, had no prior following, no marketing budget, and no content strategy beyond the egg itself.
It worked precisely because it meant nothing, asked for nothing, and expected nothing. The internet, presented with pure pointlessness, decided this was the content it had been waiting for. The egg revealed something important about how virality actually works that the entire marketing industry is still trying to process that meaning is not required.
In fact, meaning can be a liability. An image that demands interpretation, carries a message, or tries to make you feel something specific is asking something of the viewer. An image that is simply there, inexplicable, undefended, and completely at peace with its own absurdity, asks nothing. And netizens, exhausted from being asked things constantly, respond to that with an almost overwhelming relief.
Traditional comedy has a structure that dates back further than anyone needs to trace right now. Setup. Tension. Punchline. Resolution. It's a reliable formula, and it works, which is exactly why younger generations have largely abandoned it in favor of something considerably harder to explain to anyone over 40.
Internet humor has evolved away from jokes that make sense and toward images, videos, and captions that deliberately resist interpretation. The weirder, the more disconnected, the more aggressively pointless, the funnier. And the reason, when you look at it honestly, is not that difficult to understand.
When the world feels too chaotic and increasingly resistant to logical explanation, comedy that reflects that chaos back is oddly comforting. A completely unhinged image of a man in a supermarket car park wearing a full medieval suit of armour next to a shopping trolley makes no such promise. It just exists, as baffling as everything else, and somehow that feels more honest.
What the internet has accidentally invented, in its relentless production of contextless bizarre imagery, is a digital revival of one of art history's most deliberately unhinged movements. Dadaism emerged in Zurich in 1916, born from the collective trauma of World War One and the conviction that a world capable of that level of destruction had forfeited its right to be taken seriously.
The Dadaists responded by making art that was intentionally nonsensical, provocative, and resistant to conventional interpretation. Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to an art exhibition and called it Fountain. It is now one of the most discussed artworks of the twentieth century.
The parallel with contemporary internet culture is almost uncomfortably precise. Both movements emerged from periods of profound global instability. Both use absurdity as a response to systems that have stopped making sense. Both derive their power from the rejection of conventional meaning rather than the pursuit of it.
The Dadaists had manifestos and gallery spaces. The internet has Tumblr and Reddit. The urinal has been replaced by a photograph of a horse wearing sunglasses on a motorway, and the artistic merit is, frankly, comparable. The movement never really ended. It just waited for wifi.
The aesthetic now known as "cursed images" has a surprisingly precise origin story. In 2015, a Tumblr blog simply titled "cursedimages" launched with a single blurry photograph of an elderly farmer standing in a wood-panelled room surrounded by crates overflowing with red tomatoes. No context, just the image, and the instinctive feeling that something about it was profoundly wrong.
The account took off immediately, spawning countless imitators, dedicated subreddits, and an entire vocabulary for categorising images that resist comfortable interpretation. What makes a cursed image distinct from simply a bad or weird photo is the specific feeling it produces. Not quite fear, not quite confusion, but something in between that your brain can't quite file anywhere useful.
The lighting is slightly off. The composition makes no sense. Something is present that shouldn't be, or absent that should be. It's the visual equivalent of a sentence that is grammatically correct but means nothing. The farmer and his tomatoes started something that the internet has been gleefully expanding ever since, and the images in this collection owe him, specifically, a considerable debt.
For anyone considering contributing to this noble tradition, there are unspoken rules to the perfect contextless image that experienced practitioners understand intuitively. First, the setting must be mundane. A supermarket. A car park. A field. Somewhere so ordinary that whatever is happening within it is rendered maximally inexplicable by contrast. A giraffe in a savannah is nature. A giraffe in a Lidl is content.
Second, the subject must appear completely unbothered. This is non-negotiable. The moment anyone in the image acknowledges that something unusual is occurring, the magic evaporates. Eye contact with the camera is permitted only if it is completely, serenely devoid of explanation.
Third, and most importantly, there must be no caption. Not "lol." Not a string of emojis. Not "found this." Nothing. The image must arrive completely alone, like a postcard from a dimension with no return address and no suggestion that an explanation is forthcoming. Because it isn't. That's the whole point. That's always been the whole point.
What has been your all-time favorite cursed image? Tell us about it in the comments!
