The Enduring Appeal of the Vince McMahon Reaction

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the August 2020 issue of Meme Insider, a magazine covering memes and other internet phenomena. You can subscribe here.

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This year has been hard on everyone. It's a time of social upheaval, activist movements and prolonged periods of instability and stasis. In times like these, it's important to remember that memes can also be expressions of joy and excitement, a real moment of connection between people.

This might help explain the continued use of the Vince McMahon Reaction, which has quietly maintained its place as one of the internet's most widely used and beloved variations of the progression meme format. Often mistook as another version of Galaxy Brain, the Vince McMahon Reaction preceded that meme and benefited from its popularity. While Galaxy Brain offers memers another chance to mock a dumb opinion, the best use of Vince's elastic face comes from a place of positivity. Vince's gaping maw gives memers a chance to show enthusiasm. Because that's where the Vince McMahon reaction separates from other progression memes: It's just oh-so sincere and precisely what we need right now.

The Vince McMahon reaction has been puckering its lips and crossing its eyes online since at least 2013, but the clip dates back to 2002. During some story arc where Vince is hiring an assistant, the segment sees McMahon evaluating and rejecting applicants based on workplace attire and gender. He's Vince McMahon; he doesn't want someone qualified, and he certainly doesn't want a man. He's holding out for someone who's willing to have sex with their boss -- what a guy. Lucky for him, WWE Diva Stacy Keibler shows up. As the crowd chants "we want puppies" (the WWE's pet name for breasts), Vince, red-faced and sweating, huffs with orgasmic glee as he beholds Keibler's *sigh* puppies. It's the type of clownish misogyny that helped define the WWE's "Attitude Era," when collaborations with Jerry Springer and Mike Tyson seemed as fresh as the morning Mountain Dew.

McMahon and the WWE have always been good subjects for memes. Not only because he and his wrestlers play to the back of the arena, with oversized expressions and stunts, but also because they tap into a specific nostalgia ingrained in the millennial psyche. The WWE’s Attitude Era was an aspirational lifestyle for 12- and 13-year-olds in 2002. It was everywhere: in video games, on cereal boxes, in commercials and multiple nights a week on the USA network. In a similar way, wrestling is like children's television. Memers today play on the shared nostalgia of the past, creating a shared memory with their followers. Similar to how grownup fans of “Lazy Town” turned that show into a meme factory, a generation of grownup wrestling fans look back at the Attitude Era now and realize just how insane it was.

But Vince is weird even by the WWE's standards. His persona as a soul-crushing, fascistic boss is generally considered a parody of his real-life exploits. Still, the idea of a weirdly buff, grey-haired businessman in a leotard getting beat up by his employees tapped into the American dream of one day suplexing your annoying boss through a table. In one of the era's most famous moments, Stone Cold Steve Austin sprayed McMahon with a firehose of beer. Who could resist that? It's no surprise that one of the breakout stars from this era, the Rock, is now one of the world's biggest celebrities. Our connection to this era is stronger than WWE superstar Mark Henry, "the strongest man in the world." In 2013, a little over a decade after the segment aired, the meme kicked off in earnest with a video remix of the scene, replacing Keibler with the insanely shredded bod of bodybuilding champion Gary Strydom. The Vince McMahon Reaction meme's viral spread happened just as those fans entered the workforce and met the Vince McMahons in their lives.

It would take about four years for the meme to find its footing because it required a missing element: The Galaxy Brain. Between 2013 and 2017, memes that would later influence the McMahon reaction came to the fore. Whomst, Increasingly Verbose memes and Galaxy Brain, the godfathers of all modern progression memes, exploded in popularity in the 2010s. The internet glommed onto the format, particularly Galaxy Brain, which features one bad concept taken down a path of increasingly dumb and improbable logic. The final panel of Galaxy Brain sees the "hot take haver" reaching a singularity of stupidity expressed by emanating rays of light shooting from their skull as if they're reaching dumb nirvana. Galaxy Brain launched into the stratosphere in 2017, a year of endless Trump takes and just near-constant dunking on media commentators that got the 2016 election so wrong.

Galaxy Brain was a perfect meme for its time, a progression of ironic detachment, anger and clarity. And the format never really lost steam. Variations of it and its offspring still exist today, like Putting On Clown Makeup. There is a difference in these two memes' intentions though, as with all progression memes. While Galaxy Brain indulges the tenuous logic of some online opinions, Putting On Clown Makeup shows a self-reckoning. The meme puts one's flawed thought process into perspective: The person with the take is only hurting themselves.

By that same token, the Vince McMahon reaction has its own set of rules. For one, it is far more positive than other progression meme variations. There's no flawed logic here, just pure excitement. Taking its cues from the video game meme classic the Reaction Guys, which shows two panels, one of a group of IGN writers quietly watching an E3 presentation and another panel of them cheering with excitement, the Vince McMahon Reaction thrives on enthusiasm. It breaks down the elements of its subject and orders them in a hierarchy, with Vince becoming increasingly orgasmic at every level. Vince gets exponentially more excited with every panel, capturing sincere enthusiasm. The marriage of Vince's beyond weird facial contortions and a memer's earnest passion is a fruitful one, especially on the sarcastic wasteland of the internet. It's a celebration of nostalgia and the stupidity of pro wrestling and expresses joy for something in the present.

Its influence can still be felt because the McMahon reaction has its own Clown Putting On Makeup, an offspring meme that captures some of its positivity. Buff Guys Help Out Nerdy Kid shows patience that the Galaxy Brain bypasses. Instead of mocking the Nerdy Kid’s opinion, the Buff Guys, in a series of heightened and agreeable rebuttals, work through his problem and offer a solution. When the future’s looking bleak and answers are in short supply, these two positive progression memes are an oasis in a desert of cultural negativity.

It's easy to forget, in the near-constant world of review bombs, fan backlashes, trolling and online harassment, that some of us are generally excited about things online. Right now, as the world becomes increasingly dark in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, the Vince McMahon reaction is a ray of sunshine, reminding us to be excited for things too. Every reaction doesn't have to be a negative one, and Vince McMahon’s is a stone-cold stunner.