KYM Review: Breakthrough Meme Formats Of 2021

Some may say that memes are the lowest form of art since they are extremely accessible and for everyone to enjoy. But unlike pop music, comics or video games, memes also brag the unparalleled capacity for mutation and changing form, with each year bringing new, unique ways to make memes, and new tools and apps to make them in.

In 2021, we saw memes in our dreams or had neural nets make them for us, while meme arch-formats such as Sigma Grindset and schizoposting influenced dozens of formats. It's time to review the cutting-edge formats and archetypes that defined the past year.

Neural Net Image Generators

It's almost 2022, and it definitely feels like it's high time robots started doing the bulk of our work so we humans could spend our time doing something more enjoyable. While we're unable to offload all our daily duties onto their mechanical shoulders just yet, we can already delegate the task of making a meme or two to them. Sites such as Artflow.ai and NeuralBlender can automatically generate images provided on a description using high-level neural net magic, and while they can't produce funny memes without human help just yet, the portraits and pictures they are can pump out are already very impressive and will easily net you as many internet points as your average funny picture.

Memes From Dreams

If you think memes created by AI are cool, how about memes that were generated by your own brain — while you were sleeping? In 2021, a whole bunch of people wrote about seeing memes in their dreams, and some of them, such as Yass Pills and Wiseposting, managed to develop into full-blown formats. Will we see even more dreamy memes next year?

Vocoding

Vocoding, the meme practice in which audio from a viral video gets spliced together with a popular song (usually "Gangsta's Paradise"), wasn't exactly invented in 2021. But while the first vocoded memes appeared in early 2018, 2021 was the year when vocoding really spread to the masses, with many curious mememakers learning how to create the effect in FL Studio or Audacity just so they could merge their favorite meme with Coolio's certified classic.

Self-Replicating Tweets

The word "meme" can be defined as "an idea, behavior or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture." "But what if memes could spread even more efficiently than they already do?" Twitter user @koopashi proposed before repurposing Twitter's "Conversational Ads" function for creating memes that could spread almost on their own. Should one of your followers click the Tweet #bingus (or "Tweet #carp," or any other thing), and, voila, the exact copy of your meme is already on your timeline, and then on the timeline of those who click this copy, et cetera, et cetera. Cr1TikaL, Gromit Mug and a dog with a yee yee ass haircut have all been the benefactors of the ingenious meme-replicating technique this year.

Happy / Sad Comparison Formats

Let's be honest: comparison formats are nothing new, with the oldest of them, Drakeposting and Persuadable Bouncer being the major hits in the year 2016 (which is like 500 years ago in internet years). But in 2021, we witnessed a development that not only brought back comparison formats into the mainstream, but also made them more inventive at the same time. All it took was changing the old and boring "good / bad" formula into new and shiny "happy / sad" formula (or "happy / i am deeply traumatized" formula, if you will). New-wave comparison formats like Dean Norris' Reaction, Traumatized Mr. Incredible, I Was Acting and Two Guys on a Bus easily remained among mememakers' favorites for the entire year.

Video Captions

When last year we featured GIF Captions as one of our breakthrough formats of 2020, video captions had already been a thing. In 2021, combining a funny video with a caption that interprets it in a comical, often inventive way has been one of the top mememaking techniques, and examples are just too numerous to count. Some, like Punisher's “No, No, No” draw their humor from memorable lines or the subversion of the original clip, while others, like D4DJ Death Threats and Lore vs. Lore just don't work as well without music.

Vine Thud

Even if you don't know how it's called, you've definitely heard this memorable "BOOM" sound effect in some random suspect-vid-compilation-zoomer-humor-montage type of shitpost on TikTok or YouTube. Highlighting anything and everything from suspect moments to someone's cringe to massive fails, Vine Thud was one of the top enabler formats of the year, able to turn even the least funny videos into quality memes with its zoomer humor powers.

Sigma Males

Sigma Males memes are so different yet so ubiquitous and so embedded into meme culture that one could instantly recognize their unmistakable vibe in two different memes that have nothing else in common. The sigma influence can be seen everywhere: from Sigma Male Grindset, the most vanilla Sigma Male format, to We Are Not The Same, a 2019 snowclone revitalized and forever changed by the Sigma energy, to your everyday comment section where some stuff only a complete sociopath would do gets instantly labeled "Sigma behavior." A joke that the entire internet is on, the Sigma influence on the 2021 memescape cannot be understated.

Schizoposting

When in February 2020 9GAG user berelik posted a Troll Science meme in which a person covers themselves in oil, they could hardly envision that their innocuous creation would cause a domino effect that one year later would beget a sanity-consuming meme arch-format we today refer to as Schizoposting. An archetype that unites a good dozen of subformats exploiting topics such as schizophrenia, living in someone's walls and forgetting to take one's pills to spend time with imaginary waifus has been a major trend in 2021, supporting the recent comeback of Trollface with its twisted creativity.

Yassification

While FaceApp had many successes with its filters in the past, barely any one of them earned the app as much popularity as its "Feminine" filter, aka the Yassification filter, which took Twitter by storm in November. By cranking up the effect to 11 by putting the same photograph through the filter over and over, users achieved the levels of "yass" not many thought were possible. The meme became so prominent that the gimmick account Yassify Bot was created solely for the purpose of industrial-scale yassification — and what's even better … nobody was safe from it. See for yourself.

15.ai

Created in 2020 but achieving massive recognition thanks to its use in Yee Yee Ass Haircut memes in 2021, brilliant text-to-speech tool 15.ai and voice-acted memes were a match made in heaven. Able to imitate voices of characters such as SpongeBob and Team Fortress 2 mercenaries, the bot became an indispensable tool for those who wanted to add extra glamour to their shitposts by voicing them, but lacked the acting skills to do that.

Looking for more of this year's best viral phenomena and memes? Be sure to check out our other 2021 meme roundups below:

• The Top 10 Memes Of 2021
• KYM Staff Picks Of 2021
• The Top Gaming Memes Of 2021
• The Slang Of 2021
• The Most 2021 Stories Of 2021
• Top 10 Streamer Moments Of 2021
• Breakthrough Meme Formats Of The Year
• 10 Best TikToks Of 2021
• Top 10 Lewd Memes Of The Year
• Trolls, Rumors And Hoaxes Of The Year
• Top Exploitables Of 2021
• Top Meme Creators Of 2021
• Top Meme Revivals Of 2021
• Best Gimmick Twitter Accounts Of 2021