The Week's Best Memes, Ranked
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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. This week we have: the most fascinating ethical debates on film, "I meet someone, we talk, they leave," a failed sociological experiment, and CDC memes.

4. The Most Fascinating Ethical Debate

The meme:  Here's a funny meme that was born out of a popular upvoted post on the subreddit r/videos. Redditor u/-Harboringonalament- posted a clip from the HBO film "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee," which featured a contentious scene between Chief Sitting Bull and Colonel Nelson Miles and titled it "This is one of the most fascinating ethical debates I've seen in a film." The scene features the American military general criticizing the Sioux's claim to call the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory their God-given land, telling Sitting Bull that his people "massacred the Kiowa, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Oto and the Pawnee." Other Redditors began mimicking the self-serious title with several other movie scenes with lower stakes than, er, genocide.

The examples:

The verdict: While the Reddit-born meme works if you're in on the joke, I'm not sure this one will have much longevity, unless it catches on in other pockets of social media. 

James Crugnale

3. I Meet Someone, We Talk, They Leave

The meme: A new surge in an older format, "I Meet Someone, We Talk, They Leave" meme is an absurdist remix on emotionally earnest template. The original runs something along the lines of "I meet someone > we talk > I get attached > they leave" β€” a sad, relatable sequence of events:

The remixes, meanwhile, swap out "I get attached" for something less relatable (and funnier). 

Examples:

View this post on Instagram

happens more than i'd like to admit

A post shared by Trashcan Paul (@trashcanpaul) on

The verdict: A very fine meme indeed, with a huge amount of creative potential. We're looking forward to seeing some more remixes of this in the future.

Dan Fallon

2. A failed sociological experiment: 

The meme: As presidential hopefuls began to drop out this week before Super Tuesday β€” beginning, notably, with Pete Buttigieg β€” this kind of tweet started to appear:

As this editor began investigating the meme, I realized that I'd seen these before β€” earlier this year, and last year, and the year before that. Thus began a journey to find the original tweet of this ilk.

Which wasn't actually very hard: it comes from March of 2018, when a Twitter account allegedly run by one "Timmy Thick," an internet phenomenon who posted a lot of selfies on Instagram and elsewhere, tweeted that it had all been a social experiment run by Harvard.

Naturally, Twitter users came out in throngs to declare that they, too, had been 24-month sociological studies conducted by various universities. The resurfacing of the tweet this week was certainly fueled by jokes about presidential candidates, but, frankly, any day is as good a time as ever to pull this one out from the back of the meme closet.

Examples:

Verdict: A meme that's funny about twice when it resurfaces, but it doesn't have much variability. It also has made it such that no other institution can tweet in earnest that anything has been a sociological experiment because no one would take it seriously. This is why we can't have jokes.

Molly Bradley

1. CDC Memes

The meme: The premise for this meme comes from a simple and obvious safeguard we should all follow. The coronavirus is spreading and people are dying. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said stay calm, don't touch your face and keep your hands clean.

Pretty straightforward right? Wrong. Nothing is straightforward on the Internet. The instruction warped people's minds. Text and graphic humor were unleashed upon us.

Examples:

The verdict: A quick joke opportunity amid an ongoing health crisis? We'll take it. Lots of throwback potential, but the shelf-life on these quips isn't going to last. As the crisis gets bigger, the memes will get danker.

Adwait Patil

The 2020 Meme Power Ranking

Click each entry on the ranking to see when it debuted.

  1. Baby Yoda
  2. CDC memes
  3. Running Javelina
  4. The Range
  5. As A Treat
  6. Bernie Sanders memes
  7. I Can't
  8. This Is How I Win
  9. I meet someone, we talk, they leave
  10. OK Boomer

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