George Clooney Giving $1 Million Each To His 14 Best Friends, Pfizer Vs. Moderna, And This Week's Other 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 and instead just bounce around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.
Enter our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked. This week, we've got Twitter Fleets, Pfizer vs. Moderna, this claim is disputed, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, George Clooney giving 14 friends $1 million each and "The Crown's" bashful Princess Diana.
6. This Claim Is Disputed
The meme
Before, during and since the election on November 3, President Donald Trump, his supporters and his family have been tweeting out false claims about voter fraud and asserting that Trump himself actually won the election. (He did not.)
Somewhat helpfully, Twitter started appending warnings to tweets that make spurious claims about the election. They look like this:
Aside from the fact that it's wild as hell that in order to find an example of this, all I had to do was navigate to the US President's account, where almost every single tweet is accompanied by this warning, Twitter's labeling has prompted a lot of jokes. Because outside of the straightforward outcome of the 2020 election, fact can get considerably murkier.
Examples
To quote Ben Shapiro: "Facts [really should] care about your feelings."
Molly Bradley
5. 'The Crown's' Bashful Princess Diana
The meme
There are many things about Season 4 of "The Crown" that make it memorable. It's the season where we get introduced to Princess Diana, the much-beloved People's Princess. It's also the season where we see the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher, played by an almost entirely unrecognizable Gillian Anderson. And now it's also the season where a moment of Diana smiling bashfully at the camera has become a delightful meme.
Taken from a scene in which Prince Charles (Josh O'Connor) and Diana (Emma Corrin) are being interviewed about their upcoming wedding, the clip shows a close-up of Corrin's face as she smiles bashfully while her fiancรฉ answers questions from the press. Isolated from the context of the show, however, the clip has become highly versatile as a meme, used on Twitter to pinpoint and describe vastly different moods.
Examples
Here's the original, created by Twitter user Wayne David:
And here are other examples:
And coming back full circle to David:
BJ Pang-Chieh Ho
4. Mark Zuckerberg And Jack Dorsey
The meme
On Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared via teleconference before a congressional hearing on how their companies were handling disinformation on their respective social media platforms. Netizens noticed the stark contrast between the two tech moguls, as Dorsey appeared with facial hair resembling that of a heavy metal guitarist and Zuckerberg looked a little pale.
Twitter, of course, had a field day with the juxtaposed images and let loose with fantastical descriptions of the pair.
Examples
James Crugnale
3. George Clooney Giving 14 Friends $1 Million Each
The meme
In the race of casual flexes, George Clooney might have taken the lead. In an interview with GQ, Clooney nonchalantly dropped that he had given 14 of his best friends $1 million each. He bought 14 Tumi bags, stuffed them with cash and, having invited his friends over to receive the gifts, asked them how he could ever repay them for all they had given him: "Oh, well: How about a million bucks?" There's not much fun you can make of his generosity, but there were definitely some attempts.
Examples
Adwait Patil
2. Twitter Fleets
The meme
On Tuesday, Twitter rolled out a feature called Fleets that, while new, felt a bit similar to Instagram Stories and, well, Snapchat as a whole. These fleeting tweets live atop the regular Twitter timeline, but unlike tweets, they disappear after 24 hours. Sound familiar?
Anyway, social media users instantly mocked the copycat feature that seemingly no one had asked for โ and gay users in particular got a kick out of the fact that Fleet is also a brand of saline enemas.
Examples
Jon-Michael Poff
1. Pfizer Vs Moderna
The meme
The world got good news last week when Pfizer announced that its COVID-19 vaccine was more than 90% effective in preliminary results. Then, on Monday, Moderna announced that its vaccine is 94.5% effective. As if to one-up Moderna, Pfizer reported on Wednesday that a "final trial analysis [showed] its COVID-19 vaccine is 95% effective with no safety concerns," according to CNN. The news from both pharmaceutical companies is great, of course, but the reporting sequence of increasing efficacy rates made the race for a cure look like a bitter rivalry, which of course made for great meme material.
Examples
But why does it have to be a competition?
Jon-Michael Poff
And if you're hungry for more memes, here's last week's "The Week's Best Memes, Ranked" article, where we rank Gritty, FiveThirtyEight's origin story, calling the race for Biden, Four Seasons Total Landscaping, what's something that isn't racist but feels racist and Dean Browning announcing he's a black gay man.