But here is where we go full-on galaxy brain. Wikipedia, of all places, has one of the most intense takes on memes, describing them as, “a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution.” According to that definition, with every edit and remix, we breathe life into memes, and when they drop out of circulation they die. So like living things, memes fight for survival “through processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance.”
Black Mirror writers, take note because Wikipedia also says that, “memes that replicate most-effectively enjoy more success and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.”
At their best, memes are supremely funny. Like so funny they are absolutely worth the hours we spend on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest. And as the French word for same, même, might suggest, memes are best described in relation to their sameness.
Memes have come a long way from the Forever Alone Potato and I Can Has Cheezburger. We’ve evolved past the success of baby and doge. The black-trimmed white block letters have given way to Snapchat and Instagram fonts. The fact that TikTok encourages users to duet and add themselves to a blockchain audio track makes it the biggest and baddest meme factory on the internet.
Here, we’ll slowly document all the highs and milestones memes will reach in 2020. We'll take a close and honest look at the most emblematic memes of the year as they mark the events that shape us as a society.
August: Trump's Axios Interview
In the first week of August, President Trump sat down with Axios's Jonathan Swan for an exclusive interview on HBO. To be handed all kinds of papers and charts while the speaker just refuses to engage in reality and to respond with face after face of shock and disbelief — the power of these memes lies in just how perfectly it encapsulates the experience of a Trump administration.
August: Mentally, I'm Here
This is by no means, a uniquely 2020 meme. In fact, this meme first emerged on Twitter in 2008. But, it's a 2020 meme in spirit. Because, mentally, we're all somewhere better expressed in pictures instead of words.
Some "mentally I'm here" memes are of longing: clubs or amusement parks. Others are escapist: otherworldly realms, video games, children's shows. The mind is going to go wherever it can find some respite.
But then there are the accurate ones that picture minds in post-apocalyptic landscapes, the Midsommar crying scene, and other dreadful scenarios. The "mentally I'm here" meme of August 2020 is about best-describing the dumpsites our internal lives have turned into.
August: 2020 Photo Challenge
There is something particularly desperate about the celebrity self-meme. Ever since the pandemic thwarted production plans, red carpets, talk shows, the overall unimportance of the rich and famous became glaringly obvious. Without our attention, celebrities join us in the internet's trenches to the point where they actively engage in meme culture. Albeit, in the very-celebrity way that lets them share nine photos of themselves, looking back on the first nine months of 2020. Reese Witherspoon kicked it off, but Mindy Kailing, Kerry Washington, and even Netflix joined the trend.
July: This is a cake
Considering how old and overdone cake videos are on the internet, you'd think you'd seen it all. And for what it's worth, you likely have. Including Tasty's supercut of a knife cutting through lifelike cakes titled, "These Are All Cake." Knives sliding through red Crocs, toilet paper rolls, stacks of towels to pry apart layers of cake and frosting. Surprise! The shoe is cake!
But because it's 2020, the memes that followed were born of distrust. If that shoe is cake, who's to say this phone isn't cake? What if... you are cake? This year feels so exceptionally absurd and unpredictable, the isolation can be overwhelming, what if it leads up to this?
It's easy for all this cake talk to spiral into existentialism, but its just a sign of the times.
July: What Image Are You?
It couldn't be simpler: A picture and a name. Maybe its simplicity is what led it to go viral the way it did. In less than two weeks, there were dozens of "what ___ are you accounts," the most popular of which shattering through 200,000 followers almost instantly.
These accounts made name keychains for those with the kind of non-white or foreign-language names the gift stores never considered. Some did it for free, others accepted donations to their personal favors, while one raised money for Black trans women. But it seems the meme was short-lived: It was that last spurt of creativity before the end of summer — college students with time to kill and a surplus of frog or Guy Fieri images. The biggest account, @what_frog_you_are, made its last batch of name-memes. But while they lasted, they were a reason to feel special and chuckle in the middle of the workday. As the fad dies down, every single name can be remembered for its absurdity.
June: This You?
June was a month of political reckoning. There are always those who grind against oppression with every step they take and they've never stopped doing the work. But a generalized uprising triggered by the death of George Floyd added voices and bodies to the cause. Some voices seemed too eager to chime in and take up space before looking inward and examining how they might be part of the problem. So there came a day when the internet was overwhelmed with disruptive black tiles and all kinds of #BLM virtue-signaling.
Suddenly, it wasn't just politicians and industry giants who were getting called out. Universities, media outlets (including Refinery29), local groups, and all kinds of institutions we're forced to face themselves and make amends. People started subtweeting past offender's posts, holding them accountable with two words: "This you?"
In a column, Op-Ed staff writer and senior editor of the New York Times Aisha Harris explained perfectly why this meme carries so much weight: "Brutally crisp and blatantly rhetorical, the phrase has become a catchall representing the internet currency of receipts, forcing bandwagon participants to confront things they might have said or done that seemingly contradict their newfound commitment to the cause."
It happened to Lea Michele and L'Oréal.
June: Breonna Taylor Memes
No, anti-Black hate groups are not behind the Breonna Taylor memes. These memes are not made by hateful people celebrating her death. These memes are being made and shared by people trying to hold her killers accountable.
The rise of the Breonna Taylor memes can be taken to signal one of several changes: Maybe the internet, like the "real world" is a cruel and apathetic place. Maybe our online sense of humor has crossed over into the unforgivably-dark side. Maybe, our efforts to remedy our collective forgetfulness reveal just how quickly we can fall out of touch, or how out of touch we were in the first place.
Lili Reinhart recently apologized for sharing a topless picture of herself with the caption: "now that my sideboob has gotten your attention, Breonna Taylor's murderers have not been arrested. Demand justice." This is the most visible example of the memeification of Breonna Taylor's death. But it's not just misguided celebrities. It's anyone who has Tweeted or shared a post, like "Wake up, apply serum, arrest the cops that killed Breonna Taylor."
Breonna Taylor was brutally killed in her own home. The killers have yet to be held accountable. People have been asking for justice for over 100 days. Cries to "go harder for Breonna" and to "arrest the cops that killed Breonna Taylor," have been a regular part of people's social media interactions. We've committed the ultimate offense of letting her death become just another thing we post and share online. We've let it slip into the nothingness of our routines. And it's doing more harm than good. Black women on Twitter shouldn't have to explain why this dehumanizes Black women and that this matter shouldn't be treated as a joke.
May: My Plans vs. 2020
You know shit hit the fan when stating the year is all it takes to make a meme. Especially when it's hardly even June.
This meme is as straightforward as it gets: Two panels. One panel depicts a before scenario with "my plans" and the second one — simply labeled "2020" — showing the violent and sudden disruption that turned everything upside down. This meme is proof that Twitter is still the dominant meme factory of our time, effectively de-throning Instagram and holding its own alongside TikTok.
It's us versus the year of our Lord 2020. They say that if you want to make God laugh, make a plan.
May: X AE A-xii FKA X AE A-12
Welcome the era of the TikTok meme, where it's not just about texts and images, but songs and sounds too. And who better than to usher in a new era of memes — and possible human history? — than Elon Musk's and Grimes' firstborn son.
Their debut as a couple at 2018's Met Gala was a meme-worthy moment, but the memes became so much more when Grimes's pregnancy was announced. Gen Z worked through its anxieties about the future with these memes, anticipating the 2020 birth of the Grimes-Musk baby and imagining him as everything from a robot-alien to a Messiah or even the Angel of Death. This all came to a head when X AE A-xii Musk was born on May 4th, 2020.
The best thing about the X AE A-xii memes is that in 20 years they will become the perfect time capsules of what the internet was going through. If you look at all of them as a whole you'll find a generation struggling to make sense of a pandemic, figuring out an uncertain future, working out its relationship with technology, all while being incredibly funny and absurdly creative.
April: Gossip Girl Title Meme
If you've watched Gossip Girl, you'll know that little of the show has aged well and it makes even less sense than when it originally aired. The one element of the show that did stand the test of time is Kristin Bell's voice saying, "xoxo, Gossip Girl."
So when this two-paneled template started making the rounds on Twitter in mid-April, it was the perfectly-dumb antidote to what can be generally described as a very overwhelming month. It started with a remixed version of the words "gossip girl." Then, versions of it featuring distorted faces and morphed responses gained popularity. This meme isn't really about anything. In fact, the best version of this meme is the one left blank with Blaire and Serena blankly facing each other.
April: Animal Crossing Memes
Enough people have gotten their hands on Nintendo Switches and Animal Crossing: New Horizons to have a robust meme catalog. These memes don't just joke about the actual game, like this incredible hype version of Isabelle's song or finding "creative" ways to pay off your debt to Tom Nook. The Animal Crossing memes on TikTok show that people are playing the game to cope with life under lockdown.
April: Nature Is Healing
This is easily one of the funniest and aptest memes of our times. It mixes sci-fi with internet absurdity to document this truly unique moment we're experiencing. On the one hand, the human species is fighting a pandemic. On the other, all that time spent inside is lowkey doing the environment some good.
But not that much good: The "nature is healing" meme was first a fake news report gone viral. Once a lot of the original posts were debunked, the internet got really creative with the memes, and this Lisa Frank one is certainly the best.
April: Me On March 1 vs. Me On April 1
It has been a long month. And that's referring to both March and April.
After a collective agreement to not celebrate April Fool's (because these times are cursed enough), we woke up in April dazed but mostly shocked at how much had happened in just a month. On March 1, anything was possible, but by April 1, we had become jaded.
But of course, not everyone was bright-eyed-and bushy-tailed on March 1, so a counter meme emerged where March 1 and April 1 look exactly the same.
March: Zoom Memes
It might just be time to declare that 2020 will be the year of the laugh-to-stop-from-crying meme. The World War III memes set the stage in January, and now in March, we've grown used to the coronavirus memes. These memes point to the absurd and ridiculous realities that make everything so precarious right now. As we reach cruising altitude, we're settling into life made up of Zoom classes, Zoom meetings, and Zoom social lives.
March: Nero Trump
President Trump confusingly retweeting a meme of himself being compared to Nero (the Roman emperor that played the fiddle while Rome burned).
March: #WashYourLyrics
Hand-washing has never been so important. But it took a TikTok collaboration between a dancer and the Vietnamese Health Ministry to get people to take it seriously. Over in America, it was the work of a UK-based developer, who created a website where you can search a song and generate a hand-washing diagram, that got people to commit to their civic duty.
February: Confused Billie Eilish
Ever the posterchild of Gen Z angst and indifference, Grammy-darling Billie Eilish was deeply confused during this year's Oscars. Behold the face Gen Z makes when millennials start reminiscing about Feist and landlines.
February: Bloomberg's Memes
This is the political advertising equivalent of Steve Buscemi saying, "How do you do fellow kids?" In his bid for president, Michael Bloomberg paid an Avengers-style cohort of meme accounts to run meme-ads for his campaign. The memes followed an unflattering DM format where the Bloomberg campaign's Instagram account clumsily asks popular memers to, well, meme him.
January: World War III
This is most likely the first meme of 2020 and, in retrospect, it seems to have predicted the range of instability this year has brought so far.
During the first week of January, we learned that President Trump ordered the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian government official. A general understanding of world history will likely lead you to the realization that such assassinations have often been cited as catalysts for wars, world wars to be exact.
So what else are we to do as a society, if not laugh through the anxiety? More than any other meme before it, World War III memes taught us that we cope best when we laugh.
January: TikTok's Rosa
Welcome to the Rosa Cinematic Universe. You got a dollar?
Rosa was born a TikTok character as some kind of parody of a latinx highschooler from Los Angeles. She is lovably loud and anyone raised in a latinx community knows that there are two kinds of people: those who ask for dollars and those who forfeit them.
This meme started to gain momentum in the very last days of 2019, when TikTok users started dueting with Rosa, challenging her request for slushy money, and, with later videos, flirting with the star of the Rosa Cinematic Universe. Then her video about connecting with a gay classmate came out, and it became an instant template for everything from celebrity encounters to viral tweets.
But it wasn't until 2020 that this character took achieved viral meme status with Irish, French, Shakespearean, and even Simlish version of "You got a dollar?"
January: "I am once again asking for your financial support"
Not only is he on the other end of the Democratic spectrum, but Bernie's meme moment of 2020 is the literal opposite of Bloomberg's – it's successful, a testament to the power of the image macro.
According to Know Your Meme, the first known meme based on the 2019 ad emerged on Reddit in mid-January. The accompanying text (and the comments that followed) can be interpreted as total disdain for "Bernie bros" – the perceived dominant demographic of Bernie Sanders supporters. In its inception, this was a meme that made fun of left-wing trust fund babies. But its viral success has assured that every possible version of this meme – favorable to Bernie, unfavorable, and unrelated – now exists.
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