For the last two decades, some of the weirdest and most creative things on the internet played out in images and GIFs. There have always been terrible memes, but for years, memes as a category were consistently funny, useful, inspiring, and even thought-provoking. They crossed over into all of the furthest reaches of our culture, serving as communal glue that invited us all to participate in a recognizable and easily adapted conversation. But judging by what we saw in 2023, it’s clear that the golden age of memes is over. Call it an obituary: memes are dead.
The most popular memes of the last 12 months are barely worth mentioning: Kevin James, Angela Basset did the thing, Skibidi Toilet, can you even remember the others? Most of Rolling Stone’s list of best memes of the year aren’t memes at all, they’re topics of discussion, with entries including nepo babies, orca attacks, and asking your boyfriend how often he thinks about the Roman Empire.
The smirky stock photo of Kevin James taken to promote his 25-year-old sitcom King of Queens was undoubtedly the biggest meme of the year. Here’s the joke: Kevin James looks smug and a little embarrassed, here’s an example of a time people feel smug or embarrassed. Hilarious. Examples include “When u accidentally like a selfie from 34 weeks ago,” or “watching someone else get blamed for your fart.” Is this how far we’ve fallen?
In one sense, it’s a return to the dawn of meme culture with low-effort “I can haz cheezeburger” style artistry. That isn’t a good thing. The barely amusing cat memes of the early 2000s walked so we could run, and now we’ve forgotten how running works. Our latest meme harvest is all syntax no substance.
This isn’t some lament about how the children are failing us. We’re talking about the consequences of the changing ways we use the internet. Post-pandemic, the web has shifted from an image-based ecosystem to one focused on videos. Part of that comes from the rise of speedy internet connection, but it obviously stems from the growing dominance of TikTok.
In 2023, A lot of the creative energy we used to spend editing memes was taken up reacting to TikTok trends, with shining examples including girl dinner, beige flags, and “this was you when you were a baby.” You could call that a changing definition, but we’re stretching the word meme so far it doesn’t make sense anymore.
Jumping on a popular TikTok format is not a meme. Posting links to an article about Livvy rizzing up Baby Gronk is not a meme. Making jokes about the Chinese spy balloon is not a meme. These are trends.
Before the comment warriors launch their attack, yes, it’s true that these things fit the classical definition of the word “meme” that comes from the philosophical study of memetics, or what Richard Dawkins called “units of culture” that live in our minds. Words can have multiple meanings, and when the internet adopted the idea of “memes” it was in reference to a very specific thing that was malleable enough to riff on endlessly. Argue if you want, but you’re going to sound boring.
When it comes to the year’s truly memey-memes, what was there? Barbenheimer? Sure, those photos of Cillian Murphy ‘I am become death’-ed their way into our hearts, but that is a sorry showing. The same goes for the Grimace Shake. If the best we’ve got are the results of corporate marketing campaigns, we have lost the plot.
It’s not a disaster. Maybe nostalgia is a poison and we should all just move on with our lives, but it’s a little melancholy. Memes were beautiful. Now they’re dead.
We put together a list of the year’s “best” memes. They ain’t much but they’re the best we’ve got. Click through the slide show up at the top of the page to see them all, or just scroll down if you’re on a mobile device.
Kevin James
Here we have an image of Kevin James. He looks a little bit funny, doesn’t he? What if he looked funny in other contexts? Wouldn’t that be great? If you said yes, you’re part of the problem.
Boston cop slide
In August, images of a police officer careening down a slide in Boston went viral on Twitter. It’s a bizarre video. The cop is moving so fast that one reporter contacted a physicist to explore how it was even possible for his body to achieve so much velocity (the answers were unsatisfying, it’s truly weird). One thing is clear; it looks like it hurt, and reports suggest the unfortunate slider sustained minor injuries. It’s perfect fodder for memeing, and the results are among the few actually good memes the internet produced this year.
Pedro Pascal smiling
The 2022 Nicholas Cage movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent came and went without much attention. In the film, Cage plays a washed-up version of himself who agrees to star in an independent movie funded by a drug lord, played by internet heartthrob Pedro Pascal. It’s a fun but forgettable movie, but a year after its release, memes picked out a clip of the two actors in a car where an oblivious smiling Pascal gazes loving at a confused Nicholas Cage. For a moment, the internet went wild with gifs and videos of the exchange.
Planet of the Bass
Comedian Kyle Gordon has experienced middling success with skits on TikTok and YouTube over the past few years, but he finally broke out over the summer with a mega-viral parody of ’90s European techno music videos. “Planet of the Bass” is pretty funny, but the video really exploded when Gordon posted a second version of the video with a different actress playing his on-screen counterpart Biljana Electronica.
The internet took the bait with a tongue-in-cheek “where’s Biljana?” campaign, and Gordon doubled down with a third version of the video featuring yet another Biljana. So far the comedian hasn’t been able to capitalize on the success much. After the initial wave died down, Gordon’s following projects have all been comedic flops. But give him credit for managing to meme his own meme into the attention he clearly craves.
Angela Bassett did the thing
Actress Ariana DeBose graced the British Academy of Film and Television Awards (BAFTA) with a painful choreographed rap-dance. The display climaxes with a level of embarrassment as an increasingly out-of-breath DeBose listed off the accomplishments of female actors, jerking her body in time with the words “Angela Bassett did the thing.” That phrase and an accompanying screenshot had an intense period of memeing on certain corners of the internet, though it didn’t quite break out into the mainstream popular discourse.
Barbenheimer
Barbie and Oppenheimer were the biggest movies of the year by far, especially when you measure them in terms of the size of their marketing campaigns. Here’s the crazy thing: these movies are tonally different, but they came out on the same day! Incredible.
Starting on Twitter, denizens of the internet turned this corporate marketing stunt into months’ worth of free promotion. Most of the memes featured the stars of the films spliced together in various ways. Some people got really creative and juxtaposed other things that are different from each other. The entire episode was so boring that I fell into a slumber so deep that I may never wake up.
Diva Down
Disgraced congressman and alleged criminal George Santos knows how to generate attention: drama and outrageous lies. Santos’ shenanigans got him expelled from Congress, but so far, nothing can keep him out of the spotlight. His story is perfect fodder for old-man humor. For example, what if Santos said something else that’s obviously not true? Wouldn’t that be funny?
The answer is no, but some things are, indeed, hilarious about Santos. To his credit, he’s embraced his tarnished image and is using it to enormous financial and popular success while talking shit about all of his old colleagues. Most recently, he appeared for an interview on the show Ziwe, where the titular host is famous for humiliating her guests with scathing questions. Fortunately for Santos, you can’t embarrass a man who’s both shameless and self-aware.
Skibidi toilet
Skibidi Toilet is the latest viral Lovecraftian horror that passes for children’s entertainment on YouTube. It’s an ongoing series named after its main character, who is a man’s head poking out of a toilet. Skibidi Toilet engages in a variety of uncanny and vaguely disturbing escapades. Kids eat this stuff up, apparently. The videos garner millions of views, and unsettling images of Skibidi Toilet are spread wide across the culture of the kids’ internet.
Selena Blanket
Singer and actress Selena Gomez posed for a photo wrapped in a blanket. It’s nothing special, but the image is distinct and self-serious—perfect fodder for memes.
Ketchup and seemingly ranch
Much of Taylor Swift’s army of fans approach her life and work with Q-Anon levels of intrigue. To outsiders and fans who don’t take Swift quite so seriously, the whole thing is bizarre. One of the many fan accounts that obsess over the singer’s every move posted a picture of Swift posing with a fan in front of a plate of food. The breathless caption describes the scene: “Taylor Swift was eating a piece of chicken with ketchup and seemingly ranch!”
The excitement over Swift’s snack, paired with the careful effort not to jump to any conclusions about the white condiment on the plate, took certain corners of the internet. It’s a modest but perfect example of just how far gone internet fandom is in 2023.
Of course, Heinz jumped in with a Ketchup and Seemingly Ranch tie-in product that ruined everything.
Gag city
“Gag City” takes a lot of background to explain. The word “gag” is used to voice excitement in the LGBTQ+ community, and at some point, it evolved into “gag city.” The whole thing is hard to follow, especially from the outskirts, but in the last few months of 2023, Minaj and her followers jumped on the phrase “next stop: gag city” to promote her album Pink Friday 2.
The album cover features Minaj standing in front of a skyline of pink buildings, and supporters quickly decided that this was the fabled Gag City. The meme features various AI-generated images of scenes from Gag City, a place where everything slays.
