This one came and went pretty quickly, but there was something just so innocent and ridiculous about it. So a dude on Reddit takes a picture of his dog. He's sitting in front of what looks like a birthday cake, he's got a party hat on his head. And, most importantly, he looks really high. The dude denied giving bonghits to his dog before taking the photo, but you know there's no proof. Myriad photoshops followed.
Usually when celebrities get sucked into the memepool, it's a pretty tragic thing - either they're being torn up for stupid crap they did or they're being Rick Astleyized and their career is over. However, 2010 saw a very strange thing with Keanu Reeves. First, a paparazzi took a shot of the Matrix actor on a park bench in Los Angeles, eating a sandwich and looking dejected. The Internet seized on this odd little picture and ran with it, kicking out hundreds of hiarious photoshops and even naming June 15th "Cheer Up Keanu Day." The year saw a bunch of other celeb photo memes - Strutting Leo, Prancing Michael Cera - but Sad Keanu was the best.
An interesting trend in the memes of 2010 is the transformation of tragedy to triumph. Take the Bed Intruder song. When Antoine Dodson was interviewed by the local news about a series of rapes in Huntsville, Alabama, the subject was very serious. But his spirited delivery, unforgettable catchphrases and pink doo-rag made him a viral video celebrity. When the Gregory Brothers, creators of Auto-Tune The News, got ahold of his clip, their remix was viewed over 50 million times on YouTube, making everybody a pile of money - enough for Dodson to buy a house and move his family out of the projects.
2010 was in many ways the Year of 4Chan. The anonymous imageboard has been gathering steam in the last few years with the attacks on Scientology and the like, but this year they showed that they are a brutal force to be reckoned with. They took on the MPAA and the financial institutions who pulled support for Wikileaks, but the most notable was the case of poor Jessi Slaughter. When this 11 year old girl posted a video talking tough at haters on YouTube, 4Chan's notorious /b/ board opened the floodgates, trolling the crap out of her and inspiring legendary response videos and Slaughter appearing on Good Morning America.
The Insane Clown Posse have been around for a dog's age, but 2010 was probably their best year yet. Why? One word: magnets. The song "Miracles" off of their album Bang! Pow! Boom! became a gigantic viral hit for its insanely dumb lyrics, most notably "F---ing magnets, how do they work?" dozens of responses and parodies followed, including a remarkably great one from Saturday Night Live.
Okay, nobody's going to argue that the Gulf oil spill was anything close to a good thing. But one good thing did come out of it - @BPGlobalPR, the fake Twitter account set up by an enterprising hoaxster to deliver news and spin on the ecological catastrophe. In crisp, 140-character blasts, the anonymous owner (who went by the name "Terry") systematically humilated the company and their incompetent response to the spill. It's almost worth using Twitter for!
This one captured our attention something fierce, while maybe illustrating some facets of our society we might want to leave hidden. A fistfight aboard a AC Transit bus in Oakland, California was captured by an amateur videographer and uploaded to YouTube. The plot is simple - a mentally ill white man and an African-American man trade words, then blows, with the other passengers egging them on. The disturbing racial factors in the video, combined with participant Thomas Bruso's T-shirt that read "I AM A M*THER*CKER," catapulted it into the zeitgeist. Remixes exploded, including a particularly great Mortal Kombat one.
The cool thing about memes is that they don't have to be current, as Russian singer Edward Khil discovered when his 1966 recording of a Russian song entitled "I Am Glad, Cause I'm Finally Returning Back Home" became a YouTube sensation in 2010. When he recorded it originally, Khil had to censor the lyrics to placate his Soviet overlords, replacing them with a nonsense "Trolololololol." The video is bizarre and hilarious, and quickly went viral, creating new interest in Khil and his music
Okay, so this one got more than a little played out over the course of the year, but try to clear your mind and think about how hilarious it was the first time you heard poor bonged-out Yosemitebear stagger out of his tent and see that double rainbow. True, unfiltered human joy has rarely been experienced in such quality. Sure, he quickly wore out his welcome with appearances on Jimmy Kimmel and that stupid Windows Live Photo Gallery commercial, but whatever. Let the hippie have his moment.
| 2 | Facebook Cartoon Character Profiles |
So it was really easy to make people do things on Facebook this year - from the idiotic "where do you put your purse" lady meme that somehow drew attention to breast cancer (explain to me again how that was supposed to work) to the winner on this list, the "Change your profile image to a cartoon character to help abused kids" thing that swept the site in late November. Okay, guys? To help abused kids, volunteer in your community. Get off Facebook. This only got hilarious when a group of similarly irked people started spreading the rumor that the cartoon picture thing was actually started by a pedophile group to give them easier access to kids' profiles.
Manufacturing a meme is a tricky proposition - hundreds try, most fail. But when the geniuses at The Chive loosed Whiteboard Girl on the world, they hit a home run. Purportedly a set of photographs emailed to a small company by a quitting personal assistant, detailing her boss's love for Farmville and porn, they spread like wildfire until Internet Detectives revealed the hoax. It hit all of the buttons - hot chick, personal humiliation, and secrets. Who needs WikiLeaks?
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