KYM Review: The Most "2020" Stories Of 2020

ou don’t need me to tell you that 2020 was filled with bad news. There was a lot of death and violence this year with the coronavirus pandemic and the summer’s race riots, and to top it off, it was an election year featuring the most volatile incumbent president in living memory. Every day it seemed social media timelines were an endless screed of hellfire, with some disaster taking center stage for a day before a new, equally terrifying disaster took its place the next.

However, 2020 was also filled with weird news. 2020 was one of the most bizarre years in recent history, for alongside every tragic story, there seemed to be another story that flashed before our eyes and made us all go “Dafuq?” 2020 being 2020, these were almost all quickly forgotten as a new, more important story broke, but had they happened in any other year, they would have provided months’ worth of content, jokes and memes. Most of these were compiled into 2020 Bingo memes, but they deserved much better than that. This list is to give the weird, vile, barely believable stories of 2020 their due.

Man Starts Fire Fapping To Twitch Girls

We’ve discussed how 2020 was one of the horniest years in recent memory already, but no man was as angry about it as the guy who sued Twitch for $25 million after getting so horny at women on Twitch he ejaculated on his computer screen and started a fire.

There isn’t really much more context to this story that makes the headline sound less ridiculous. In June, a California man with OCD and (supposedly) sex addiction filed a complaint against the company because the women on the platform are too dang sexy. The suit stated that Twitch made it impossible for him to avoid seeing boobies that exacerbated his condition, causing him distresses such as a chafed penis, bloodshot eyes, and a destroyed gaming rig caused by him ejaculating onto it, starting an electrical fire. His claims that Twitch have forced him to see the platform’s most popular female streamers like Alinity and Pokimane seem to hold little weight, however. At the time of filing the suit, he followed 786 female streamers and 0 male streamers.

Murder Hornets

In the first few months of 2020, apocalyptic news came at a slower rate than it seemed to later in the year, leading each month to have a “disaster of the month” meme. In May of 2020, that disaster was the Murder Hornets.

The “Murder Hornets” were a colony of Asian Giant Hornets so massive they could potentially wipe out native bee populations, leading to disastrous effects on American ecosystems. They also kill 50 humans a year. While scientists were busy putting out fires, sometimes quite literally, throughout 2020, in August, they captured their first Murder Hornet. This was instrumental in helping them eradicate colonies from the Pacific Northwest, and since not much news about the Murder Hornets has dropped since then, we all hope means that scientists have beaten the hornets and we won’t be hearing about them in 2021 (please).

Hermain Cain Tweeting From The Grave

Former Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain contracted COVID-19 and died in July of this year. It is speculated that Cain may have contracted the illness at a controversial Trump rally in June where he was photographed without a mask amidst a large crowd. Just over a month later, he passed.

While the story sadly mirrors those of many Americans who lost their lives in 2020, what brought the story to the realm of the truly bizarre was that in August, Cain’s Twitter account tweeted about a controversial study which said COVID-19 isn’t all that deadly.

Obviously, Cain didn’t write the tweet but rather his team and family, who were committed to the Republican Party line of downplaying fears of the coronavirus even while the man they worked for died from the coronavirus just a month prior. The staffers made their distinction from the late Cain clear going forward but continued to downplay the coronavirus throughout the remainder of 2020, which was frankly an astounding commitment to principle, even if those principles are literally lethal.

Mystery Monoliths

Right at the end of 2020, with the election over and the year just about to let the world go from its horrible grasp, mysterious monoliths of unexplained origin began appearing across the world. The first and most famous one appeared in Utah, where it sat in the desert for ten days before being dismantled by environmentalists, but monoliths also appeared in Romania, California and the UK, piquing public interest. The monoliths had unmistakeable 2001: A Space Odyssey vibes, so for anyone who viewed 2020 as a slow march to the end of times, they were practically expected. After last year, the headline “Mystery Monoliths Pop Up Across the World” barely even registered as a bizarre story.

At the time of writing, it appears the monoliths are the work of guerilla artists. New Mexico art collective the Most Famous Artist has claimed some responsibility, saying that "The monoliths are built by a distributed community of interdisciplinary artists." The ones that have popped up around the world remain a mystery, but most observers agree that it's the work of imitators rather than a coordinated global conspiracy. It's a disappointingly benign explanation for one of the year's most mysterious stories, but hey, that's 2020 for you.

Quibi

While the entire entertainment industry struggled to stay afloat amidst social distancing protocols throughout the year, no company failed as mightily as Quibi, an experimental original short-form video platform that launched and failed in the span of five months. Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman’s ill-fated project hinged on the idea they could deliver commuters 10-minute television shows to be streamed exclusively on mobile devices. Obviously, the global pandemic locking everyone inside for the year made this pitch doomed from the start.

However, what made Quibi more than just a sad media story was that it didn’t just flop based on the experimental nature of its premise but that all of its shows seemed completely insane. Its content lineup included such hits as “Woman falls in love with her golden arm that is killing her” and “Anna Kendrick befriends a sex doll and the two go on wild adventures.” Quibi’s content lineup drew more than one comparison to 30 Rock throwaway gags, and one Twitter user pulled off a successful hoax that the platform hosted a Jack Sparrow impersonator reality show. Quibi may be gone, but the memory of the wild folly will live on in our hearts.

Dead Man Wins North Dakota State Senate Seat

The 2020 election brought with it a host of bizarre stories, but few epitomized the election as much as a dead guy winning a State Senate seat in North Dakota. Republican candidate David Andahl passed in October due to coronavirus complications, leaving the state in a pickle. He appeared on track to win one of his district’s two senate seats and with no time to find a replacement candidate, the North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem figured that it would be unfair to remove Andahl from the ballot, as mail-in voting had already begun. Republican officials in Andahl’s district will select a replacement for Andahl.

The Dakotas have become the hotbed for the coronavirus in America, with as many as 1-in-3 residents having the virus. The states have appeared to be staunchly against enforcing safety protocols, with many of its residents attending a large, un-socially distanced bike rally and jock rock festival in South Dakota earlier in the year. In a sense, you could say the late Andahl’s election to state government after he passed was just as much an election win for the coronavirus.

Rudy Giuliani

The 2020 election was defined by many things, such as a raucous and unwatchable first debate between Biden and Trump, the ever-present shadow of COVID-19, and the surge of mail-in voting that prompted the highest turnout in an election in American history. But the post-election fracas of furious but ultimately impotent legal challenges to overturn the results of Biden’s victory can only be defined by Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and now Donald Trump’s personal attorney, had himself a hell of a 2020, debasing himself so completely in a two-month stretch that was awe-inspiring for its totality and speed.

While Giuliani had grown infamous for his connections to Trump over the course of his first campaign and throughout his administration, October-December of 2020 seemed to feature one jaw-droppingly embarrassing Rudy story after another. The first scandal of note (at least for memers) was him getting caught with his hand down his pants in the company of an actress playing an underage female reporter as part of a prank in Borat 2. Then, after news organizations officially called the election for Joe Biden, he kicked off a comically awful legal battle by apparently trying to book the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia for a bombshell press conference but instead booked the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company next to a sex shop and a crematorium.

Then, as his numerous legal challenges were failing in court, Giuliani held a fire-and-brimstone press conference in which he sweated through his hair dye, leaving ghoulish streaks streaming down his face. To top off 2020, just after Giuliani announced he’d contracted COVID-19, the Supreme Court tossed out a desperate plea to overturn the election results in several key states and the Electoral College sealed Biden’s victory. There were many meltdowns in 2020, but no man melted down quite as literally and figuratively as Rudy Giuliani.

Gender Reveal Wildfire

Summer of 2020 was particularly hellish, but amidst the racial unrest and ongoing pandemic, a couple lit California on fire finding out the sex of their baby. In September, it was reported that the El Dorado fire in San Bernandino county, which wound up burning over 8,600 acres of land in the state, was started by a pyrotechnic device used in their Gender Reveal party.

The story itself became a meme that month, as pictures of various disasters were captioned things like “It’s a boy!” Gender reveals have always been viewed by many as a frivolous celebration, and the fire won the controversial practice no new fans. It felt like the final straw for the fragile human psyche: the Gender Reveal Wildfire was a perversely perfect amalgamation of the escalating state of climate emergency and the annoying bourgeois habits.

Man Shoots Himself In The Nuts

In a year where many Americans seemed staunchly opposed to undertaking even the most basic of safety protocols to mitigate the spread of the pandemic, perhaps no story served as a perfect metaphor for 2020 than a man shooting himself in the testicles.

Earlier in the year, a bizarre trend took off on Facebook in which men started pointing guns at their crotches. While many interpreted this as yet another ridiculous attempt among conservatives to trigger the libs, the trend was actually a part of an intra-gun owner squabble. Crotch-pointers were gun owners who were attempting to prove a point to other gun owners who in their eyes seemed overly enthusiastic about trigger discipline. A certain subset of gun-owners were so annoyed that these trigger discipline enthusiasts assumed no one knew how to handle a weapon that they took shitpost-style pictures of guns pointed at their crotches to trigger them.

However, these shitposts eventually resulted in a dude shooting a hole in his nuts. An anonymous man in the group “Loaded Guns Pointed At [B]enis” took the shot in August, shooting a bullet from a .45 caliber gun clear through one of his testicles. Evidently, he’s fine and learned his lesson, but it’s unclear if any of his crotch-aiming brethren have learned theirs. In a year that featured Americans apparently staunchly set on figuratively shooting themselves in the dick, one American took it the extra mile.

Looking for more of this year's best viral phenomena and memes? Be sure to check out our other 2020 meme roundups below:

• The Top 10 Memes Of 2020
• The Top Meme Revivals of 2020
• The Top 10 Gaming Memes Of 2020
• The Horny, Bewildering Slang of 2020
• Top Wojaks of the Year
• 10 Best TikToks Of 2020
• Best Meme Creators Of 2020
• Breakthrough Formats Of The Year
• The Memes That Defined The Coronavirus Pandemic in 2020