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The Best Memes of 2019

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Cats, Baby Yoda, and kombucha topped this year's memes. (Photo Credit: JassTheLass / Twitter)

Movies, games, comics, TV shows: all well and good, but if you want to peer deep into the beating heart of human culture in the 21st century, the way to get there is through memes.

Youth culture is meme culture now, with TikTok, Twitter, Instagram ,and other social media services providing vectors of infection that see memes endlessly replicating and changing. These are the 11 memes that sum up the year for us, from hungry cats to feral hogs.

Cats Can Have Little A Salami

We do a lot of things on the internet, but one thing we do the most is ask questions. The entire spectrum of human knowledge is out there in this series of tubes, so when we need to know something we ask the smartest person we know – who also happens to be the dumbest.

So when somebody stumbled upon an article asking whether house cats can eat salami on a site called MeatMenStore, it answered a question we never even knew we had to ask. The answer, complete with a perfectly accidental Borat-style malaprop, is “Cats can have little a salami as a snack,” and that irresistible turn of phrase was immediately inescapable.

Gamer Girl Bathwater

It’s a hard life out there without a hustle, so we can’t begrudge anybody trying to make a living. But when a game streamer named Belle Delphine started offering jars of her bathwater to fans for thirty bucks, it kicked off a meme firestorm that burned brightly through the summer months.

The South Africa-born streamer has over 4 million Instagram followers and a reputation for oddball stunts, but the bathwater thing was so outrageously craven and weird that it was all we could talk about. And then came the hoaxes, with purported customers claiming that they’d drank the water and gotten herpes, or had it DNA tested and found no trace of human skin.

Baby Yoda Holding Tea

The Mandalorian was the saving grace of Star Wars this year, a great illustration of how George Lucas’s universe is way better when you get out to the fringes, away from the whole Jedi dynasty drama. The show’s breakthrough character, of course, is “The Child,” the little green-skinned dude everybody else on Earth is calling “Baby Yoda.” The non-verbal little guy holding a mug of broth has become the new Kermit sipping tea, sliding in under the wire to claim a spot on the year’s best memes.

30 To 50 Feral Hogs

On a serious note, the debate over gun control in the United States was one of the more contentious issues of the year, as a seemingly uncountable number of mass shootings were met by… well, nothing, from the government. When one gun owner responded to country music star Jason Isbell on Twitter with “how do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play,” the utter absurdity of the question launched feral hogs into the top of the meme rankings. The wild swine did more to keep themselves in the news over the course of the year, including destroying a $22,000 cocaine stash hidden in an Italian forest.

Buff Guys Helping Nerdy Kid

It’s rare that a meme can make you feel good, but there’s something about the format that’s just absurdly wholesome. In four tiers of photos, a young man asks a question online, only to be answered by posts from a trio of absurdly swole musclemen who refer to each other as King and Chief.

Originally, the format started with the bodybuilders posting first and were more negative, but a “wholesome” version with the teen first quickly came to dominate, with topics ranging from computer upgrades to finding self-respect and respect for women in Goth culture.

Woman Yelling At Cat

The magic of the meme economy is in how it constantly recycles and comments on itself. The image of two women screaming emotionally comes from a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills episode from 2011. The white cat making an odd expression at the dinner table, from a 2018 Tumblr post. But it was in 2019 that some genius had the idea to put these two reaction images together to create something truly new. The emotional charge of the two pictures was incredibly flexible and funny, and it’s been used to illustrate thousands of different situations.

Sorry To This Man

Sometimes the best memes come from happy little accidents. When Vanity Fair interviewed Keke Palmer to promote Hustlers, they hooked the actress up to a lie detector for added hijinks. When posed with whether her character from 2008 Nickelodeon sitcom True Jackson, VP was a better vice-president than noted torture fetishist Dick Cheney, Palmer responded with an instantly memeable summation of Cheney’s dark legacy: “I don’t know who this man is. I mean, he could be walking down the street, I wouldn’t know a thing. Sorry to this man.” “Sorry to this man” became a deeply useful catchphrase that was deployed over and over through the year.

Egg Is Bigger Than Before

When somebody on the Internet figures out something that people pay attention to, it’s only a matter of time before the copycats come out to play. Simple instructional videos featuring household items are super popular, pioneered by BuzzFeed’s Tasty cooking series, but a clip that went viral from Cyprus-based Facebook account “5 Minute Crafts” upended the whole game. In the video, which popped on Twitter in July, a pair of hands takes an ordinary egg, soaks it in vinegar, then in maple syrup, and then in water dyed blue to make… a blue egg that is Bigger Than Before. What can you do with it? Why did you waste three days doing it? The world may never know.

Jeremy Renner: The App

Celebrities are funny people, and the internet makes them funnier. As Avengers star Jeremy Renner prepared to launch a singing career in 2019, some smartass convinced him that what would really take his career to the next level would be a custom app, like Kim Kardashian has.

The Jeremy Renner app, though, would flame out after some of the most ridiculous trolling of all time. With no restrictions on user names or any content moderation, dozens of users started impersonating the star on his own app, impersonating other celebrities, posting about pornography, impersonating celebrities posting about pornography, and impersonating Casey Anthony. By the first week of September, the Jeremy Renner app had been shut down at the actor’s request.

Kombucha Girl

@brittany_broskiMe trying Kombucha for the first time #foryoupage #foryou #fyp #AllBrandNew♬ original sound – brittanyt445

If you’re old, you can remember a time when the internet seemed more honest, before Instagram filters and curated timelines, when people were comfortable just… existing. The clip of a woman named Brittany Tomlinson tasting kombucha, the trendy fermented beverage, for the first time hearkens back to that era.

In just a few seconds after her first sip, Tomlinson’s face runs through a panoply of emotions as she tries to decide whether it’s actually palatable or not. The clip went mega-viral, making her possibly TikTok’s first home-grown star and getting her fired from her job at a conservative Texas bank.

OK Boomer

After years of being told that they’re responsible for the myriad ills facing society, 2019 was the year millennials fired back with two words: “OK boomer.” Simple, dismissive, and utterly conversation-ending, there was no turn of phrase that better captured how sick of everything we were in 2019.

As the vast majority of American wealth remains concentrated in older generations, and as younger people have less and less potential to buy their own homes, pay off their student loans, or live the dream that Boomers took for granted, it represented the first major salvo in a generational meme war that will rage into the next decade.

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