Fucking wojacks. Disappearance of this cancer will bring significant benefit to me specifically because I wouldn’t have to endure those ugly drawings. Fucking trollface was better than this hell.
I am willing to sacrifice all five funny memes you are talking about, if it means I will not have to look at all the “I depicted you as this ugly undesirable wojak saying stupid things therefore I won” bullshit ever again.
Rage comics were better and were actually a modern form of Commedia dell’arte or Masked Theatre, in such that it used stock characters and so plot could be both meaningful but simple. Wojacks lack implied character and context, so story or character depth requires explanation which doesn’t usually work as well with that form
Probably something banal circa 2000 - a viral hit that shifted how people experience and share comedy. Peanut Butter Jelly Time or Badger Badger Mushroom, maybe. A stupid lolrandom tween magnet without much there. The result wouldn’t be some predictable drastic shift, but a delayed uptake in the proliferation of Flash, or AlbinoBlackSheep, or Newgrounds.
No, I got it - You’re The Man Now, Dog. That stupid movie-trailer quote turned into a stupid looping-sound-bite website, which was massively influential once it opened to letting anyone upload a WAV / GIF pair (browsers did not support MP3 or video at the time) and throw in some gigantic text with a zoom effect. It was a very early site for the modern sense of “memes” as in forced variations on a theme - text on an image, nowadays, or mashing a few images together. And the whole thing was predicated on one ridiculous looping sound file over a picture of Sean Connery.
Aaand then that stupid website became a locus for white supremacist and alt-right propaganda. Using the moon-headed character from McDonald’s 1980s Mac Tonight ads. None of this is a joke.
Meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene in 1976, and defined as the equivalent of a gene but for more abstract ideas (because the gene is ultimately just a unit of information as well). I don't remember for sure if religion is specifically an example he personally used, but if it's not it's very comfortably in the same vein.
I'm thinking you have to go way back, something like lolcats, advice duck, ceiling cat, something where if you remove it from the equation meme culture just straight up does not develop, or does not develop the same way or at the same time.
Before LOLcats was Demotivational posters, which were just the generic motivational posters, but with a humorous twist. Motivational posters had a black border with text on the bottom, which made it easy to swap out in MS Paint with funny text back in the early Internet days. It was the first caption memes, which became even more popular when people started doing it with cute cat pics too.
AYBABTU. It was one of the first “real” memes that grew organically. If youtube had existed back then, the creators would probably have been set for life off the views from that one video alone.
Somehow this is the first time I’ve ever seen, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” shortened that way and it left me thinking it was something even more arcane 😂
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