What Is A 'Deep Fried Meme'? The Common Visual Style Of Modern Memes Explained

Have you ever seen a JPEG image online that looks like it has suffered years of abuse from cruel photo editors? That, my friends, is what's called a "deep fried meme."

For years, memers have pushed into uncharted, ironic waters by taking regular memes and throwing them through every filter and effect they can think of to make the image look as terrible as possible (similar to "moldy memes"), resulting in a unique, highly "late-2010s" visual style that carried into the 2020s.

Here's the history of so-called deep fried memes, how they began and why they're prevalent online.

What Is A 'Deep Fried Meme'?

A deep fried meme is usually an image macro that has been thoroughly abused by photo editing software to look as blurry and miscolored as possible. In general, the pictures are highly oversaturated, resulting in bright colors, often yellow or blue, taking over the majority of the image.

The actual content within the meme tends to be exceptionally average, "normie" humor, but the wild editing gives the image an air of surreal and dark humor, as if the intense editing the memes undergo is the only way to make them palatable to a memer of taste.

How Did Deep Fried Memes Begin?

The first Deep Fried Meme identified by Know Your Meme was posted to Tumblr on March 24th, 2015. The idea of editing memes so severely existed beforehand, but the below photo is the first to have been called a "deep fried meme" according to our research.

Over the course of the following decade, "deep fried memes" became a common sight online, and the method of making such memes has gone largely unchanged.

Though the original Reddit community is gone, the subreddits /r/deepfriedsurrealmemes and /r/nukedmemes have over 17,000 and 432,000 subscribers, respectively, as of September 2024, making them some of the largest communities dedicated to the memetic style.

However, the heyday of deep-fried memes was undoubtedly just before 2020. Around 2018 and 2019, the /r/deepfriedmemes subreddit had over 1 million subscribers. It was ultimately shut down by moderators, and no single community has taken its place.

That being said, deep fried memes continue to see use to this day, as social media users understand that if they see an image that looks like it has been cruelly abused by a photo editor, the poster is probably going for an ironic laugh.

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For the full history of Deep Fried Memes, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.