Please Stand By, 'Why Are You, As A Man,' 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 Please Stand By, Juergen Teller photographs, Joe Jonas's birthday message to Sophie Turner and "why are you, as a man."
4. Please Stand By
The meme
With "WandaVision" as the most popular TV show in the world at the moment (even more popular than Bridgerton!), fans have begun making pithy in-jokes about the series online — chief among them that the "Please Stand By" chyron appearing at the end of each episode is the most feared villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
With the show so abbreviated to begin with, the message has left many viewers unsettled. Netizens sick of staring at those words after each viewing have turned to memes to vent their frustration.
Examples
James Crugnale
3. Joe Jonas's Birthday Message To Sophie Turner
The meme
Last Sunday, Joe Jonas posted a birthday message to his wife Sophie Turner, along with two different images of the "Game of Thrones" star. The first photo had Turner dressed up and posing with sunglasses, while the second one featured Turner in a slightly goofier pose.
Twitter users who were expecting more of a contrast between the two "moods" began to give tongue-in-cheek responses to Jonas's tweet. The tweets poked fun at how often people like to characterize the people around them as being offbeat or weird or doing things out of the ordinary when, really, they're just doing perfectly mundane things that all of us do.
Examples
BJ Pang-Chieh Ho
2. Juergen Teller Photographs
The meme
Yesterday's fashion magazine discourse is today's meme. For W Magazine's Best Performances issue, German photographer Juergen Teller shot a series of covers with stars like Tessa Thompson, Steven Yeun and Jared Leto.
His portraits, however, immediately garnered fierce online criticism, with many calling him lazy and a fraud. Riz Ahmed, who was also a part of the campaign, called him an "OG" and said the whole shoot took "20 seconds [and] two clicks."
Now the question is, would you hire him, as Kim and Kanye did, for your photoshoot?
Examples
Adwait Patil
1. Why Are You, As A Man
The meme
Toxic masculinity is not new, nor has it evolved very much over time. The tropes are endless: men drive big trucks and brag about their sexual prowess, men express anger when they're really feeling sadness, men only share a shred of feeling whilst working out with other men, etc. But we pay so much attention to what men should be doing and not nearly enough to what they should decidedly not do. So Twitter has been providing some examples.
Examples
Molly Bradley
And if you're hungry for more memes, here's last week's "The Week's Best Memes, Ranked" article, where we rank the J.Lo Challenge, Ted Cruz goes to Cancun, Martin Scorsese vs. streaming, "It's always 'wyd'" and "To the Joker."