THE EVOLUTION OF THE MEME
We’ve come a long way since the Dancing Baby, writes
And Richard Dawkins said: “Let there be memes.” And there were memes. “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation,” the English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author wrote in his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene. “Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.”
However, scientific origin aside, the meme as we know it should actually be attributed to Mike Godwin, whose aphorism, “Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies” — popularised by the article “Meme, Counter-meme” in Wired in 1994 — proposed that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches”.
It appeared with an accompanying graph and the two together are regarded as the embryo of the modern meme: our daily source of online entertainment and the primary perpetrator of WhatsApp spam.
God(win) has spoken, and so, without further ado, let’s take a trip down meme-ory lane:
1990s: Digging the dancing memes
The Dancing Baby, Baby Cha-Cha or Oogachacka Baby came from a 1996 video featuring a 3-Drendered animation of a nappy-clad infant chacha’ing. It reached millions of viewers and made several appearances on the TV show Ally McBeal, which further propelled its meme fame.
Not only did this bobbing bambino succeed in spawning the first of many viral videos, it also provoked a prolonged, passé debate over the pronunciation of “gif”. Fast-forward to 1998 — the year of the Hampster Dance. By now hardcore internet fans know it’s not pronounced “jiff”; internet ignoramuses have heard the term; blogging is about to become a craze; and hamsters are still cute. It’s the year Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte inadvertently picks the perfect time to create a viral meme. Multiple rows of gifs displaying animated hamsters and other rodents dancing to a sped-up version of Roger Miller’s Whistle Stop flood the world wide web.
LaCarte’s website, on which the Hampster Dance was uploaded in August 1998, had, by March 1999, amassed approximately 60,000 views.
Early to mid 2000s: Me(h)ms
Things were a bit meh on the meme front in the early 2000s. A few exceptions garnered attention owing to the advent of imageboard websites, including 4Chan and Reddit (founded in 2003 and 2005, respectively).
The phrase, “You’re the man now, dog!”, courtesy of Sean Connery in Finding Forrester, was one exception, as was the
Star Wars Kid, a leaked video of a 15-year-old brandishing a golf ball retriever like Darth Maul’s light saber.
In 2005, martial artist Chuck Norris’s hyperbolic statements about his masculinity became popular memes — did you know that Chuck Norris once dug a hole with a spoon? It’s known as the Grand Canyon.
In 2006 we were introduced on the internet to what would become the custodians of our psychological wellbeing: cat memes: lolcats, Kitler — cats that resemble Hitler — and Longcat.
Late 2000s — 2010s: meme-mania overtakes Beatlemania
Congratulations! Homo sapiens has officially become the helot of cyberspace — we should have paid more attention when George Orwell wrote about an interconnected, 24/7 surveillance state in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“Google” is now a verb. Know Your Meme, an internet meme database, has the authority to verify confirmed memes and we’re Rickrolling our friends and family (a prank and an internet meme involving the unexpected appearance of the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up).
Her Royal Spearsness has to be left alone, velociraptor philosophy memes take over from Plato memes, Kanye immortalises his interruption of Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV awards and the Matrix actor becomes the Sad Keanu meme after he’s photographed alone on a park bench looking sullen.
Soon enough, the bourgeoisie are being mocked for their misguided sense of privilege in the First World Problems meme, also known as White Whine — “I’m so tired of eating … at all the restaurants near work!”
Nyan Cat, a cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart body and a rainbow behind it, dominates cat memes and Spider-Man permeates the meta-verse.
Ermahgerd!, also known as the Gersberms and Berks meme, makes fun of young Maggie Goldenberger, who helplessly watches an internet meme spawn from her awkward adolescent photo. Willy Wonka actor Gene Wilder in the 1971 musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory becomes the most condescending of memes and Doge, a Shiba Inu dog with complex inner monologues, becomes de rigueur. Soon enough, YouTube makes fad videos famous — anyone remember the Harlem Shake? Rihanna’s egg-yellow 2015 Met Gala dress with an enormous train is lauded by Vogue and modified by us in pizza, yellow brick road and egg-in-pan memes.
The Bee Movie is the B-movie classic the Twitterati have been waiting to turn into a meme, Harambe, a 17-year-old lowland gorilla is killed by a Cincinnati zoo keeper and reincarnated as a meme, and Drakeposting becomes a common meme using two screen captures from Drake’s Hotline Bling music video to denote preference of one thing over another.
Brazilian actress Renata Sorrah is immortalised as a woman confused by maths and SpongeBob makes a comeback in the Mocking SpongeBob or Spongemock meme. A white guy blinks, a boyfriend is distracted and becomes known as the Man Looking at Other Woman meme, the Babadook from the 2014 indie psychological horror film is co-opted into a gay icon meme and Salt Bae is the nickname given to Turkish chef Nusret Gökç, who quickly becomes a meme with his flamboyant steak salting, making us salivate for sodium chloride. Moths are superimposed on heads and Edward Hospital demonstrates precision surgery on a grape.
Adorable Baby Yoda is. Sandra Bullock blindfolded in the film Bird Box becomes a viral meme and, most unusual of all, a picture of an egg breaks the world record for the most-liked image on Instagram (#SorryNotSorry, Kylie Jenner). To start the new decade, Adam Driver punches a wall in a scene with Scarlett Johansson to instantly become the meme to signify frustrated arguing the world over.
2017 to 2020 was kind to content creators …
In memoriam: virtual feline phenomenon Grumpy Cat dies in 2019 — rest in puss.
We may only be five months into the year 2020, but the past 20 weeks have dished up a smorgasbord of occurrences begging to be satirised, imitated, and replicated. Thank you Carole Baskin from docudrama Tiger King for greeting all her fans with the immortal words “Hey all you cool cats and kittens”.
In late January, Dolly Parton posts four very different pictures of herself, for LinkedIn, FaceBook, Instagram and Tinder, and captions them, “Get you a woman who can do it all.” Thanks, Dolly, for aiding us in our quest to become well-rounded women. Thank you also Elon Musk and Grimes for naming their son X AE A-Xii , the moniker that launched a thousand memes.
Quarantine = quaranmemes
You know the spiel: wash your hands, wear your mask, don’t participate in zol-jols, limit your daily constitutional to the two minutes and 30 seconds you’re actually allowed outside, nurture a Stockholm syndrome relationship with your place of residence … Fortunately social media remains a source of delightful distraction during the epoch of the Pandemic. We South Africans owe thanks to local-is-lekker meme accounts lamenting (or LOLmenting) the shitty situation that is Covid-19.
Some memes are suggesting we rather snitch on a brother than pay R650 for the 750ml Skyy Passion Fruit he’s offering you. Dololo memes have been spread around the country to comment on the situation. Other memes compare the duration of the lockdown to that of the completion of Cape Town’s Foreshore Freeway Bridge, which ceased construction in 1977 — thanks for that one, @Southafrikak Instagram account.
Britney Spears “regrams” a quote by Mimi Zhu calling on us to “connect now more than ever”, “feed each other” and “strike”, resulting in the Princess of Pop being declared the new face of democratic socialism.
Thank you, Comrade Britney Spears: just like wealth redistribution, these memes are too good not to share. Pravda!