As the year comes to a close and we're wrapping up gifts for our loved ones, let's take a minute to remember the reason for the season: honoring the various memes that burst forward this year and made us exhale out of our noses while we scrolled.
A meme is more than a news item. A meme crystallizes a moment in time and gives us all a common ground to chuckle on. This year was as turbulent as ever, which is all the better for meme enthusiasts like us. After all, the best memes are born out of uncertainty, chaos, and a healthy amount of brain rot.
So, from Reddit to Instagram to (don't make us say it) X, these were the memes that came out on top and will encapsulate 2023 forever.
In September, the shining star of Paul Blart: Mall Cop gave us another unlikely gift, in the form of one of the most versatile meme formats of the year. Well, I don't think Kevin James himself actually had anything to do with the resurfacing of a Getty image from an Aughts-era King of Queens promo, but boy did it resurface. His saucy little smirk became the perfect template for all sorts of aw-shucks content.
She's everything. He's just a nuclear physicist. This summer saw one of the biggest movie release days of all time, and cinephiles the world over were planning their dream watch schedules. The internet was abuzz with #Barbenheimer riffs, and everything pink and black became an instant meme. Who says the movies are dead?
The internet's favorite daddy provided a plethora of meme content this year, but our favorite, and perhaps the most enduring, is the gif of him innocently chewing a sandwich. He caught the world's gaze as the single father lead of two of the year's biggest shows, but he kept the gaze as the unintended symbol of unbothered-ness.
If you read that title a couple of times and still didn't understand it, you're in the majority here. The phrase, which to many is Gen Z word salad, swept the internet for its asinine, chronically online-ness. What really happened is that a youth football player/ influencer met a gymnast/ influencer. Satisfied? Me neither.
Everyone's (least) favorite bird app got a little more dank back in July, and we all paid the price. The Notorious Elon Musk pulled Twitter out from under us and left us with X. Does it now sound like an adult video site? Yes. Is it confusing as heck? Also yes. But at least it gave us some chuckles on the way down.
On June 12th, McDonald's purple furry icon celebrated his 52nd birthday and had a ridiculously decadent meal to celebrate it. The Grimace Shake was perhaps the year's biggest food meme, its unknown purple depths enchanting internet users the world over. Bottoms up to the brave souls who had a sip.
A handful of salted cashews, a hunk of almost-rotten cheese, and a venti sweet cream cold brew. Or perhaps just a can of corn eaten with a fork. In 2023, this was dinner... for girls. Girl dinner became a new favorite phrase, summing up the kind of scavenging and piecing-together that passes for a square meal in a pinch. But you don't need to be a girl to have girl dinner, just a sense of rebellion and a spirit of ingenuity.
Ice Spice and Olivia Rodrigo may have been the year's breakout pop stars, but TJ Mack, whose impromptu anthem "Sitting" weaseled its way into public consciousness, is also a ripe contender. The song, the brainchild of Brian Jordan Alvarez, has the energy of something you might make up while you're doing household chores, with a melodic hook ripped straight from the Top 40. Fans instantly responded to the unlikely earworm, and the video racked up more than half a million views on TikTok.
The show that had everyone rapping L to the OG and becoming self-conscious of their "ludicrously capacious bags" came to an end this year and provided some great memes on its way out. One of the standouts was Succession's main character Kendall Roy, who became a sad boy icon. The tortured billionaire son found unlikely relatability with the Twitter crowd.
It's not every day you get to see the mugshot of a former president, and old 45 brought the noise with his signature blue steel, burning a hole right through the lens. It became the perfect reaction image, with a sizzling scowl. Move over Lindsay and Paris, there's a new mugshot diva in town.
This year some of us had had it up to here with constant hustle culture. We were tired of maintaining a grindset and wanted to give in to the urge to be cozy and wholesome in a cabin somewhere. Winnie the Pooh was a huge inspiration, along with, of course, Frog and Toad. Call it cottagecore adjacent, call it a rejection of modernity, either way, we embraced everything Paddington coded.
Memes, at their core, are historical documents that reflect the environment in which they were created. If you took the AP U.S. History test, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So it'll be no wonder if, in 50 years, students have to explain why in 2023 everyone was suddenly baffled by the price of eggs, and why a frittata suddenly seemed like caviar.
High fashion and so-called streetwear have long been the subject of scrutiny from us discount rack dwellers. So when a company called MSCHF launched a pair of boots that looked like they belonged on Astro Boy, the internet does what the internet does best: roast and meme the heck out of them. Is it just me or do they look like they'd be really comfy?
In 2023, mothers mothered and servers served, and a brand new sentence took hold of stan Twitter. Serving c*nt became mainstream, and celebrities who were slaying particularly hard were given doctorate degrees by their fans. And they weren't talking about Taylor Swift's honorary master's from NYU.
In further proof that we've reached peak internet, TikTok streamers stopped acting like people and started acting like… non-player characters. They reacted to gifts and stickers in oddly mesmerizing ways, and when they broke character it broke the internet. Who knew the key to internet fame was just repeating "Ice cream yum?"