Memes, in the sense of highly relatable funny pictures, videos, GIFs, etc. oftentimes with a caption, are everywhere these days. From your computer screens to smartphones, TVs, magazines, and all the way down to graffiti and even tattoos. Yes, there are crazy people who tattoo memes on their skin. Like, come on, you’re gonna be stuck with that image of the Overly Attached Girlfriend (or something way worse) on your, umm, let’s say, rear. You should never ink passing fads on your body.
Either way, the memes are at an all-time high right now, with some people even calling themselves meme experts or meme lords. Must be the best job ever. With so many of these funny memes around it’s very easy to forget how it all started. Have you ever asked yourself what was the first meme that saw the light of day? Even though every other relatable funny picture nowadays is taken from the Spongebob cartoon, the very first meme was posted in a magazine, but it was just as hilarious! Here it is:
As you can tell, it’s a classic “expectations vs reality” template. And it’s pretty good, considering its age. So when was the first meme made? Almost 100 years ago! This picture was found in a satirical magazine called “The Judge”, which was published in 1921, making it the first meme in history. In my opinion, it still holds up. From what you can see, it’s still alive and kicking.
Since we’re discussing old funnies, here are a few more ancient memes, some of which are still pure gold!
It’s a trap!
For those of you like to call Star Wars “Star Trek” this is Admiral Akbar, from the world’s greatest sci-fi franchise. Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi was a great movie, but this meme is even better. And it’s because it’s so relatable, and can be used in almost any situation, where you smell something fishy.
All your base are belong to us!
If you think this phrase sounds weird grammatically, you’d be correct. It was mistranslated from Japanese in a 1989 Mega Drive game “Zero Wing”. For some unknown reason this phrase became a real hit in early 2000s, especially with the gamer community. Blizzard even included it as a cheat code in StarCraft, which gave you 100,000 of each resource.
ROFLCOPTER
ASCII art has always been the upper echelon of memes. Most of them were annoying as hell but very memorable, which was the point. It’s basically a depiction of a helicopter but instead of the blades it has LOL and ROFL. It’s dumb but it works! Also it’s fun to say out loud – ROFLCOPTER. Heheh.
In conclusion, here’s my question to you: Do you remember your first meme ever? What’s your current favorite?
Mine was the “I can haz cheezburger” cat. Lolcats for life!
