Memes have been around for a very long time. Would you believe the very first Meme came out in 1920? The first meme was a little two-panel comic about pictures that looks familiar to a lot of memes today.  If you don’t know what a Meme is, it is defined as “a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.” Memes are a good way to get the laughs in and get through the day. Memes have come a long way since the rise of memes in the late 2000s. Just last week, on Feb. 27, South hosted a “Meme Day” as a part of Spirit Week leading up to the Spring Dance. On that day, students and teachers dresses as popular Memes such as the Yodel Boy, Grandpa Paint Guy, and others. 

Back then memes were pictures of people with a top and bottom text. The text usually correlates to the meme as each picture portrays a certain thing. For example there were memes like Bad Luck Brian but there were also many more. Bad Luck Brian was a guy’s school picture that everyone made into a meme as Bad Luck Brian. He commented later on the meme saying he liked the meme and thought it was very funny. The top text would be something normal and then the bottom text would turn it into something very unlucky.  For example the top text would say “ gets a pet rock” and the bottom text would continue “ it runs away.”  After these types of Memes a new kind of meme took its place in the form of Rage Comics. Rage Comics are comic panels with poorly-drawn stick figures commonly known as Derp and Derpette. Rage comics commonly used characters such as the Table Flip Guy, Fuuu and Troll Face.

After Rage Comics and Bad Luck Brian-type memes came a new era of memes starting with Pepe the frog. This is a meme of a cartoon frog with big eyes. This meme came out in around 2008 but didn’t get very popular for a couple of years. Memes started getting harder to understand for some people at this point. Pepe was made a hate symbol because people drew a Hitler outfit and stache on him.

Pepe paves the way for edgier memes like dat boi. You can see Memes today like Big Chungus which is the same as Ugandan Knuckles and all of the glorious memes out there today. Memes are popular because its a way to make jokes on the internet that can take many different shapes and forms that almost anyone can find humorous in some way.

Although memes are funny a lot of the time it can affect people negatively. Some people are very hurt by memes and what they are saying. Because Memes can basically be anything the creator wants it to be, it can sometimes be derogatory to some people and anger people. For example, Pepe the Frog was the first Meme to be made into a hate symbol because someone dressed him up as a Nazi. Many people are easily offended by Memes for reasons like bullying and such.

Another instance is when a mother posted a picture of her child who has deformities on social media and she thought it was horrific when she saw that it had been  made into a meme and been reposted thousands of times saying “I could sit idly by and tell myself that there are cruel people out there and that’s the world we live in,” the mom wrote. “But you stole a photo of my 4-year-old son. Say what you want out loud, to your friends, in the comment box, but do not take my photo to degrade my child.”