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. This week, we have Bloomberg's billboard, Your Music Saved Me, You Have 24 Hours To Respond, and the Running Javelina.
4. Bloomberg's Billboard
The meme: As Mike Bloomberg's all-encompassing ad blitz continues to shake up the Democratic presidential primary, his team is spending his money in more and more ridiculous ways. For instance, this billboard:
Recognizing a blank meme canvas when they see it, Twitter users jumped on the format to dunk on Bloomberg.
Examples:
https://twitter.com/CalebJHull/status/1230939828495306752
The verdict: They're fine memes, and we have no problem with dunking on Bloomberg. If he wins the nomination, this meme will stick around, but otherwise we don't see it being a longterm meme fixture.
3. Your Music Saved Me
The meme: A teary-eyed young fan was photographed at an unidentified concert holding a sign that said "Your music saved me."
The over-the-top earnestness of the sign made it a perfect meme template for the mischievous Twitterati to juxtapose with photos of hilariously ironic pop culture figures and/or animals.
The examples:
The verdict: The mawkishness of the original photograph makes it terrifically versatile to combine with something corny — however the meme might not have the same legs as others as many folks may see themselves in that young woman's shoes, and agree that music does have the power to save lives.
2. You Have 24 Hours To Respond
The meme: Last week, a woman called Charlotte Awbery went viral for singing Lady Gaga's "Shallow" on the subway. There was no doubt that Awbery, who is a professional singer, is incredibly talented, and on Twitter, other users spotlighted her talent by comparing her performance to Lady Gaga and jokingly asking Gaga to respond within 24 hours.
While this isn't the first time this meme has popped up, other iterations of "respond within 24 hours" have grown popular these past few days, with users juxtaposing celebrities with videos of amateur talent to highlight the humorous connection between the two.
Examples:
And finally, with things coming full circle…
The verdict: We love the internet best when it's absurd, and there is nothing more wonderfully absurd than establishing a connection between the Hadid sisters working the runway and a cat strutting towards a camera in ridiculous outfits. Nice move, internet. You have 24 hours to respond.
1. The Running Javelina
The meme: This week, a video surfaced of a javelina — or peccary, a modest-sized, pig-like animal — sprinting along a road in Tucson, Arizona.
The video is remarkable partly because one doesn't exactly expect a wild animal to be out in the open, but also because this javelina is very fast, very sleek and VERY graceful (in this editor's opinion, anyway).
Of course, the memes started coming — most notably, people setting the video to music.
Examples:
Finally, in keeping with contemporary trends, someone created an account specifically devoted to giving this speedy javelina a soundtrack — ranging from the more obvious songs to more, uh, interesting choices.
Verdict: At first this exercise seemed a little silly — after all, once the initial humor of pairing the video with songs about racing or running wore off, the songs weren't even synced to the javelina's running. But once we veered into pairing the video with songs that aimed not to compound on the running but instead personify the javelina, the meme became very rich. We love this javelina and hope they are doing GREAT out there.
The 2020 Meme Power Ranking
Click each entry on the ranking to see when it debuted.
- Baby Yoda
- Running Javelina
- The Range
- As A Treat
- You Have 24 Hours To Respond
- Bernie Sanders memes
- I Can't
- This Is How I Win
- Fake Keanu
- OK Boomer
Will Baby Yoda ever be dethroned? We wait and see.
