The Week's Best Memes, Ranked
Here at Digg, we try our best to cover the most important and confounding memes that come across the timeline. But the web is littered with tons of great memes that never quite hit the mainstream, instead bouncing around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.
Enter: our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked. For the week of December 9th, we have Jameela Jamil's landlord tweet, Silver Kanye and "Marriage Story" memes.
3. The Absurdity Of Women As 'Landlords' Of Their Uteruses
The meme: This is less a meme than people riffing on a Very Bad Take by the internet's favorite good-intentions-gone-too-far celebrity Jameela Jamil. Jamil has long been in the market of going so hard on promoting generally good, inclusive, feminist-forward messages that it makes her campaigns a little, uh, daunting to join.
Most recently, Jamil posted a photo with text that read, "The choice is the Landlord's, not the tenant's, not the neighbour's. Your uterus. Your choice."
People did not love it! It has been widely criticized for the bonkers metaphor that a woman is the landlord of her body and a fetus is a tenant.
Examples:
Verdict: Honestly, the most cursed thing about this whole thing is that it is bringing together the people who are most angry about this, which is to say, on the one hand, pro-choice but anti-landlord liberals (so, most liberals) who are tired of people (Jameela Jamil) making a mockery of their earnest and valid positions — and, on the other hand, vocal pro-lifers.
Please, Jameela, we're all very tired. Let us rest.
Molly Bradley
2. Silver Kanye
The meme: Over the weekend, Kanye debuted his opera (yep) while covered head to toe in silver (yep) at Art Basel Miami. The images instantly went viral (I mean, come on) and became a magnet for jokery and meme-making (how could it not?).
The examples:
The verdict: Not a world-changing meme by any means, but we're guessing the image of a chromed Kanye will become an internet mainstay, working its way into new jokes and memes for years. Which means Kanye wins again.
Dan Fallon
1. 'Marriage Story' Memes
The meme: Last week, "Marriage Story," which stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as a couple going through a divorce, became available for streaming on Netflix. Often seen as a modern day version of "Kramer vs Kramer," the movie features a scene that begins as an amicable discussion between the two characters about their divorce and then, as the scene progresses, devolves into an ugy, heated argument that has the two screaming and tearing each other apart.
Within the context of the movie, it's a pivotal scene, but its heightened performances by Driver and Johansson soon become great fodder for meme-fication. The memes inspired by the movie substitute lines of dialogue that strip the scene of its original context and make it itno a different fight entirely, such as this:
Examples
A lot of the "Marriage Story" memes are pop culture-related or meta references to the actors' works or histories, such as Driver's role as Kylo Ren or Johansson's history working with Woody Allen:
And sometimes, in a slightly less depressing note, they're allusions to lines in other movies:
Or even just a fun crossover with other memes, such as the American Chopper meme, or debates about the dubious role of brand Twitter:
Verdict
Given that "Marriage Story" isn't what you would conventionally consider a blockbuster movie, it's surprising how well this meme took off on Twitter. But then again, who wouldn't enjoy putting words in Driver and Johansson's mouths and watch them scream out arguments about Baby Yoda or the nature of memes themselves in the most histrionic fashion? It's not the meme we had expected, but it is the meme that we deserve.
Pang-Chieh Ho
The 2019 Meme Power Ranking
Click each entry on the ranking to see when it debuted.
- Baby Yoda
- In The Right Headspace
- OK Boomer
- 'Marriage Story' memes
- Vibes
- Wholesome Buff Guys
- The Girl Drinking Kombucha Reaction GIF
- Said During [X] And Sex
- Fucking Mint
- Silver Kanye
You can run. You can hide. But you can't escape Baby Yoda: