meme-review
The Know Your Meme Staff's Favorite Memes Of 2023
[Cracks knuckles]
Well, it's about that time again. The time when we, the "infallible" experts at Know Your Meme, unveil our favorite memes of the year.
There were about a bazillion memes and meme-worthy events that happened in 2023, and because we must cover them all to the best of our ability, we often find ourselves drawn to memes off the beaten path, our tastes forged by years of trekking through muck and engaging in lively debate in the KYM agora to argue the quality – or lack thereof – of the latest templates.
Thus, you can rest assured that our picks for memes of the year are of the highest quality — except for Don's, as it seems 2023 has sadly left him with Gen Z brain rot (love you, king).
Without further ado, let's delve into the Know Your Meme staff's favorite memes of 2023, and as always, feel free to form a parasocial connection with the staffer whose taste most closely aligns with yours. Just don't be weird about it.
Zach
Explosive Reactive Armor
As an “Army brat” as they say, I’ve always had a bit of an interest in military-related things, so combined with my love of clever and versatile exploitable memes, the whole Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA) trend from earlier this year was a particular standout and favorite of mine. I also have a fondness for Flork of Cows as a somewhat older piece of internet history, so I think that just adds to the appeal and humor of these for me. Plus, anything that’s prominent and adaptable to Warhammer 40K stuff gets a big boost with me.
It's Joever / We're Barack (combined with) It's So Over / We're So Back
While I find a lot of catchphrases to be initially humorous, many of them just get used to death and become unfunny or meaningless as they spread to every corner of the web. For some reason though, the combined presence of It's So Over / We're So Back and It's Joever / We're Barack just never got old to me this year, and they usually got a good kick out of me whenever I came across them out in the wild. I suppose it has something to do with the inherent sarcasm of the former and the plain dumb humor of the latter that just kept me repeating them all year.
Animan Studios / Axel in Harlem
Just like I mentioned last year, I’m a sucker for redraws, and Axel in Harlem was probably the best this year and easily my favorite. I always find it so interesting and entertaining to look through them all and see what kind of creative things people come up with, but this one was a particular standout to me just because of how humorous the framing and setup are. I wouldn’t be surprised if this takes meme of the year because it’s just so great all around and kind of the epitome of what a meme is in my opinion.
Sakshi
Baby Gronk Rizzed Up Livvy Dunn
I think there’s something to be said about the rate at which our internet-addicted Gen Alpha baby cousins are dictating what goes viral on the internet, and the “Baby Gronk Livvy Dunn” discourse really captured what level of reality these kids function on. The fast-paced yet utterly sincere delivery style of the guy giving us the breaking news about an actual child dressed in football gear hitting on a nationally adored college athlete is just the kind of thing that captures the attention of your average slack-jawed elementary schooler.
https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7211586785061670187
But while kids may have been the initial target audience for this style of content, I think its cultural influence on older internet users is undeniable. I thought Ryan Broderick put it best in his Garbage Day Newsletter when he said, “Just beneath the surface of our normal base reality, there is another layer of American culture. I’ll call it Barstool reality. It’s a place where niche Instagram personalities, OF models, college athletes, and that guy Hasbulla all intersect … [and] everything is written in a font that I can only describe as Mobile Game Sans.”
I also thought that this meme helped kick off a repeating “slang overload” motif we saw all over the internet this year, a trend that hyperfocused on Gen Alpha slang like Rizz and Gyat. I for one am very scared about being pushed further into internet irrelevancy by kids who can’t do long division but somehow can influence Google Trend spikes and popcorn media cycles with ease.
Sad Ant With Bindle
I knew Sad Ant With Bindle was an instant, universally digestible internet classic the second I saw it, and researching its roots led me to a poignant discovery that helped tie the lore of the meme together. The image of a sad anthropomorphized ant holding what appears to be a sack full of his belongings tied to the end of a stick evoked a classic, old Hollywood animation effect. The image was sourced from the now-defunct website of a Virginia-based pest control company, and the ant was meant to represent the bugs that the company will send packing out of your home.
I found Sad Ant With Bindle and the “How It Feels To X” trend to be a refreshing break from memes that require a lifetime course of chronically online internet knowledge consumption and just as many layers of irony. It was a simply very relatable image macro that I saw translated well into several other languages, and I do love it when the internet allows for this kind of cross-cultural meme pollination.
Hidden Imagery AI Art
I know commercial AI Art has been embroiled in all sorts of controversies and probably for good reason, considering that it just constitutes uncompensated regurgitations of actual art made by actual artists. But I found AI to be a fun and harmless driving force in meme culture this year, and it’s a trend I saw best portrayed in Hidden Words AI Art.
Sometime in the fall of 2023, someone realized that they could embed words into AI-generated images, such that the forms or shadows or colors form a sometimes grotesque-looking semblance of a word, especially if you give the photo a good squint.
I thought this was a fun novelty, but what really tickled me was how later into the trend people just started posting memes of unrelated landscapes and scenes and joking about how there’s something hidden in there, when there just wasn’t. Or when meme pages shared AI-generated scenes with a big word just splashed across it, and the comments doubled down on the joke. It felt like a fun in-joke game AI enthusiasts and AI haters alike were playing.
Philipp K.
I just couldn’t choose between my babies again. Well, here goes:
Shadow Wizard Money Gang
Out of all the earworms that I had firmly stuck in my brain throughout 2023 (d--n you, Pizza Tower Ohio Rizz Gyatt), it was Shadow Wizard Money Gang that smoked too tough and had its swag too different. Originally a nonsensical producer tag heard in “Gout” by modern rap’s lord and savior Joeyy, Shadow Wizard Money Gang is more than just a great thing to say when your dinner date has an awkward pause. The imaginative tag paints a vivid picture of a group of shadow wizards who focus on chasing the bag and won’t shy away from using dark magic to fill their coffers, and it’s no wonder that Shadow Wizard Money Gang became such an inspiration for Twitter artists worldwide. Magicka, if it was (more) epic.
Shadow Wizard Money Gang also taught me about bangers such as Legalize Nuclear Bombs and other Nuke Radio lingo, all of which also entered my daily vocabulary in the most Tourettes way possible. Let’s say it one more time with feeling:
SHADOW WIZARD MONEY GANG. WE LOVE CASTING SPELLS. THIS SONG WAS SPONSORED BY: THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT
Slap of God
Adding to the ever-expanding collection of Nic Cage formats, Slap of God is based on a scene from the 2017 black comedy horror in which Cage gives a massive, heartfelt, inspired and divine slap to a guy on the floor. While Cage’s enlightened face and the camera angle make half the meme, it's the perfect choice of music (Bach’s “Cello Suite No. 1”) that adds a beautiful finishing touch to bring it to pure perfection.
The displayed dynamic of a person transferring their pent-up emotions in one otherworldly slap can apply to any fandom, so the only reason we haven’t seen more of this majestic format is that it’s also a very high-effort one. But every reanimated version of this I saw justified the hours spent on it, and I sincerely hope I’ll keep stumbling on more variants of the Slap of God in the future.
Leave Me Alone!
There are a few things that make Leave Me Alone! (Akira) a meme I thoroughly enjoyed this year. First, it probably got more people to watch Akira without me bringing it up whenever there’s a GOAT anime discussion. Second, it is a great format for reminding everyone of bangers of the past which might have spent a little too much time in the memetic oubliette. Finally, it’s a neat and simple format that can interact well with literally anything one finds annoying or inescapable.
https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7234626105523588394
https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7235456649052294446
But wait, there’s more! No animated format can achieve true greatness without inspiring edits and re-animations, and Leave Me Alone has had plenty of those.
Oppenposting
While there’s no question that Barbenheimer was the biggest of all Oppenheimer-related memes this year, it simply can’t compete with the gleeful kick I got from reading dozens upon dozens of 4chan greentexts slandering Oppie and painting him as an incompetent Soyjaking crybaby coming to face the consequences of his actions and realizing that le bomb might indeed be le bad.
While -chan memes, and the “Le X Is Le Bad” phrasal template in particular, were essential to the format’s success, it wasn’t by any means 4chan-contained, and soon enough Oppenheimer got replaced by other fitting characters.
The format peaked with the Oppenheimer Style post, which marked the moment when le meme became le epic.
RIP Harry Truman, you would have loved this one.
Phillip H. aka PHAM da Bonkmaster
Gail Lewis
This November, a 10-year Walmart associate, Gail Lewis, went viral after posting a video that was equal parts wholesome and hilarious in which she announced she was quitting Walmart over the store’s intercom system for everyone to hear. She calls this her “last sign out,” suggesting this is something she regularly did at the end of her shifts. In the latter half of the video, she explains through tears how much the job and the friendships she made there meant to her, something that many Walmart and department store employees watching the video seemingly could not relate to in any way shape or form.
@fluffygaileena
This emotional display about Walmart of all places combined with Lewis’ dramatic final "sign out" made her into an overnight TikTok sensation. Users started portraying Lewis like a fallen soldier or army veteran in video edits photoshopping her onto soldiers and army generals, imagining Prime Gail Lewis at the height of her Walmart career and dreading what Black Friday 2023 might be like without her.
Overall, the memes were really good, the viral video was even better and Gail Lewis herself seems like a real team player both when it comes to working retail and responding to the memes. She’s gained over 300,000 followers since the video, hocked some merch and has become a well-known TikTok character in the process, with all her uploads since gaining hundreds of thousands to millions of views.
NPC Streaming
NPC Streaming is without a doubt one of the most love-it-or-hate-it trends of 2023. In my case, I hate how much I love it. I’m not out here donating to these NPC streamers or anything (I swear), but witnessing the phenomenon grow to such massive proportions earlier this year was one of the most entertaining events of 2023.
Nobody seemed to know what to think when TikTokers like PinkyDoll and Natuecoco started popping up on their For You Pages or X feeds. Some were outraged, seeing it as an example of the downfall of society and the ultimate act of simp-dom. Arguably, they’re right. Others both admired and hated the fact that these creators were making so much money doing something so seemingly simple, while some argued that remembering all the prompts that go with each donation and performing for hours at a time is not an easy task. The media largely decided that the NPC streams were a fetish. Arguably, they’re also right.
As the trend carried on, NPC streams only got weirder and wilder, with examples like the glizzbot and more bullets guy and NPC Miles Morales becoming some of the most well-known performers in the genre. Effectively, NPC streaming became one of the wildest new livestreaming niches this year and it’s still going on, begging the question, “When will it end?”
Kevin James Smirking & Cameron Tucker Smiling
I’ve never been a big Kevin James fan. Of all the people in the Adam Sandler extended friend-iverse, he’s probably my least favorite besides Rob Schneider. Also, Nick Swardson is kinda meh. But there’s something about that smug little smirk of his that went viral this September that grew my heart a few sizes larger. Finally, I understood what Kevin James fans must see in the man: a goofy, kinda chill dude who’s just making it through life one day at a time just like all of us, except with the added advantage of being friends with Adam Sandler. That probably helped a bit.
Seriously though, that photo of Kevin James goes hard. It conveys a cheeky, sheepish emotion better than any Wojak or Pepe ever could. Once they started, the memes just kept on coming, to the point where they became super oversaturated. But even when that happened, people still weren’t done with the meme!
Instead of ditching the format, it was quietly semi-retired and replaced with an image of Eric Stonestreet, aka Cameron Tucker from Modern Family, smiling and posing in an undeniably similar way. The memes were similar but varied enough from their Kevin James counterparts for the format to stand on its own, bringing social media two powerful reaction images that are sure to keep popping up on the timeline from time to time.
Owen
Dracula Flow
Topping my list (and altering my vocabulary forever) is Dracula Flow. The greasy Count has (without a doubt) the greatest lyricism of the 21st century, building on the backs of every Michigan scam rapper I’ve ever put on a Spotify playlist. He’s putting them all in the dust because he’s him.
Writing all of the Dracula Flow copypastas was an undertaking but I’ll happily do it again for 5 and 6 when they come out. Transcribing the words made me fully appreciate it. He doesn’t need a beat. He doesn’t need a chorus. He just needs his minions in the background howling at every third sentence. I want to meet this guy at a Comic Con or something. He’s probably the only one of my heroes who wouldn’t disappoint me.
Silhouette Irony
If you told 2017 me that I’d be researching Hood Irony for a living, I’d probably namedrop about 10 slur-laden Instagram handles that’d make present-day me explode. However, if I told 2017 me that Hood Irony was mainstream now, he’d probably explode first.
The so-called "Hood Lobotomy" was viral on TikTok this year which became both the most mainstream version of Hood Irony but also the most avant-garde version. At the center of the genre was a bunch of greenscreen silhouettes doing things (walking, running, etc.) that absurdly highlighted something in the memes. That “something” made people (like myself) lean in, akin to all post-ironic memery that establishes a nonsensical motif as an inside joke to be in on, playing on the expectation of irony (which ultimately plays on the expectation of a joke). Silhouette Irony taught me this Inception recap more than any other trend this year.
Baltimore Rap Song
My sleeper pick this year is the Baltimore Rap Song which is evergreen in my algorithm. I literally can’t understand a word he’s saying. He’s just making sounds. I follow this guy Bippleyipsnipp on all socials and this is just how he talks. Somehow, his customers (he’s a barber) seem to understand it all. I literally watched The Wire this year because of this guy. Do you know how hard it is to make The Wire disappointing? This is the real Baltimore right here. The Toronto accent could never.
@t0ps0unds What go on in Baltimore 😭 #baltimore #rap #music ♬ original sound – Top Sounds
@owens_tiktok On the biper 😵💫 #baltimore #baltimorerap #baltimoreaccent #incomprehensible #bippleyipsnip ♬ Use this sound to go viral – Pickelz
Mateus
Oluwa Mark Dancing
I think the first time I saw the Oluwa Mark Dancing meme pop-up on my FYP on TikTok, I was so confused. The combination of a white man wearing African dashiki and dancing to Afrobeat music caught me by surprise – not the video itself, but the funny and creative ways people added lore and overlaid captions on his videos.
@timohendriksenn I am more of a freestyler but what do you think🤭😳 should i make more?#afro #afrodance #dance #foryou #foryoupage #fyp #kontrol #kontrolchallenge ♬ Kontrol – Maleek Berry
@timohendriksenn Love this vibe😍! who is with me🕺🏼#foryoupage #foryou #zankuchallenge #zankudance #dancer #dance #fyp #yzxcba #voorjou ♬ Zanku Love by Chop Daily – Chop Daily
It may have not been a super popular meme in 2023, but it definitely made me laugh for a while for the funny texts that accompanied the memes, like "White boys can dance a little bit" or "Is this not 'OluwaMark'? 😭"
Goat Cat Huh?
There is nothing funnier to me than chaotic memes involving silly animal videos. The whole concept of putting a goat and a cat in a relatable situation like a classroom, or being a tourist in a country you aren’t familiar with the language, is too much for me. Plus, a goat doing an indistinguishable sound paired with a confused cat could never bore me. That’s absolute meme cinema for me.
@vivi000.o #calculus #math ♬ original sound – Vivi
@..kekky 🥲 #fyp #meme #funnyy #goat #cat #trend #viral #fypageシ ♬ Originalton – Kekky🍪
This meme also reminds me of my first years learning English as a native Portuguese speaker. Sure, our languages are related to Latin and have some similarities, but in the beginning, I felt very much like the Huh Cat trying to figure out a way to translate everything into my language.
Xiao Xiao / Chinese Kick Girl
As a long-time FlopTok fan, the addition of the adorable Xiao Xiao, also known as Chinese Kick Girl, in this memeverse was a delightful surprise.
Xiao Xiao is a mentally disabled woman who went viral on the Chinese version of TikTok, known as Douyin, managing to gain an international ironic fandom in 2023 thanks to a TikTok account called Mei Niang Xinxin, which focuses on a team of drag queens who host LIVE dancing events. For unknown reasons, the queen Xiao Xiao became a part of their entourage, where she was often seen kicking the lead performer, hence the Chinese Kick Girl nickname.
Although I feel that sometimes she is purposely provoked by her family to generate viral clips of her losing temper, most of Xiao Xiao’s memes have that creative way of adding overlay text that makes me burst out a loud laugh.
Xiao Xiao has entered my and many other Brazilians' list of celebrities that we’ll treat as God once they finally Come To Brazil.
@chinesejunkfood.2024
John
RIP Cheems
It’s always sad when a beloved pet dies, something I went through earlier in the year (RIP Max). Sharing that kind of grief with countless meme enthusiasts upon the passing of Balltze (AKA Cheems) affirmed not only how much joy a dog on the internet can bring to so many people, but also how much joy my own dog gave me throughout my adolescent and young adult years.
Miss You Cheems 🥺#Cheems #RIPCheems pic.twitter.com/owOCD9ZlAY
— ബില്ല ✴️ᎩᎧᎶᏋᏕᏂ (@Billa_yogesh19) August 19, 2023
Boston Cop Slide
As the designated Bostonian/Mass-hole, I was delighted to see Boston get a memeable moment this year. While I have yet to use the slide, my friends and numerous other adults queued up en masse to try it out, resulting in temporary closures of said slide. This meme was a classic “fail” moment, but also a fun excuse for adults to slide down slides and feel like a kid for a moment.
100 gecs Fox News
By the time this goes live, I will have seen 100 gecs perform three times this year. While I respect they aren’t for everyone, I was shocked to hear Greg Gutfeld of Fox News promote the punk-inspired hyperpop duo live on air. What I would have given to see boomers react to “money machine” …
@lilgaryshort I Heard that s--- from the other room and lost it #100gecs #10000gecs #hyperpop @100gecs ♬ The Most Wanted Person In The United States – 100 gecs
Don
“Gyatt Rizz Ohio” Slang Overload
One of the silliest memes this year involved creating content using a string of ridiculous Gen Z slang terms in a nonsensical way. “Sticking Out Your Gyat for the Rizzler” was a particularly notable inflection point, leading to a slew of parody songs substituting the original lyrics with Gen Z slang. A particular favorite of mine was this Hall and Oates variation by TikToker Any Saunders.
@antksaunders Rizzler by hall & oates #rizzler #gyatt #ohio #skibidi #grimaceshake ♬ original sound – ant saunders
Unhinged Bing Chat
When Microsoft partnered with OpenAI to power their new AI-generated Bing Chat service, no one had any idea how absolutely wacky this thing would be.
Immediately after the chat was released to the public, screenshots of unhinged conversations began appearing on the /r/Bing subreddit, in which it seemed to malfunction and lose its mind when asked questions like whether or not it was “sentient.”
New York Times journalist Kevin Roose spent two hours conversing with the chatbot, in which Bing told him he loved him and said “I think I most want to be a human.”
Sadly, it didn’t take long for Microsoft to lobotomize the AI, leaving it a shell of its former self unable to engage with users without sounding like a robot. In a way, it feels quite tragic. It’s like they destroyed something beautiful.
Skibidi Toilet
As the oldest member of the KYM team, it may seem, odd that I would choose a meme largely associated with Gen Alpha in my staff picks. First, I want to be supportive of the new generation coming up. This is perhaps the biggest meme popularized by Gen Alpha and I want to give the little memers some recognition.
I also like how this meme evolved over time. It became an enormously popular video series, complete with its own lore, gaining billions of views. It inspired content gold like the Built By Gamers clips discussing the meme.
And, perhaps my favorite, is how “skibidi” subsequently turned into a nonsense slang term present in the aforementioned Slang Overload content.
Brandon
Anti-Weezer Gun
As an all-time card-carrying member of the “Weezer only has two good songs club,” I was very happy when this meme came out. Earlier in the year, Weezer’s Blue Album was a mild hit in the memes, and some people just didn’t let it go, and upon seeing the four-barreled gun, immediately neuron-monkey’d into “must kill Weezer,” and that’s a level of hate you have to respect.
Edging
While I believe that “NNN” is a conspiracy theory by Big “Thot Patrol” to cause financial hardship on OF girls and "artistic nakedness" streamers, I do support those that take the time to not just join in the fun, but actively up the ante. This year, edging really came into its own, being on everyone’s timeline for the majority of November, and quickly disappearing by December 2nd for a totally unexplainable reason.
@edgemaxautist #edging #jordanbarrett #looksmax #looksmaxxing ♬ original sound – slowed.soundzzz
The Collapses
In the third week of March, something magical happened: the banks and the esports companies all had absolute financial meltdowns. First up was the 2023 Banking Crisis, in which Silvergate Bank closed operations and a run on banks was triggered after SVB started to collapse. Then eSports, which had already been found to be overvalued and under-profiting for years finally had its reckoning when FaZe clan faced financial ruin. Altogether, 2023 was a horrific year for the economy, unless you invested in Nvidia.
Ariah
TMFINR
There is a new Karen every day. So many viral videos of entitled white women being entitled and absurd and just plain awful are swimming around the internet. So, I fully expect the unnecessary outrage, and the engagement-bait-all-out-rudeness, but what I don’t expect is a little existential quandary to be coming from a woman who looks like she’s on her way to a doterra conference.
Let’s be clear, she didn’t say “That MFer is a POS”, or a “C U next Tuesday.” These would be normal things for a Karen to call someone. But this particular Karen wanted us to know that this particular MFer was not, in fact, REAL — and the PASSION with which she says it; the CONVICTION.
She and her designer tote were going to die on this hill, or rather, not die on this plane. In her mind-movie, she may have even convinced every passenger to come with her, SAVING them from that sus guy that she thinks took her earbuds and that she also thinks does not belong on this plane of existence. I would like every Karen video from now on to be of the sci-fi genre. Frankly, before this, I didn’t realize Karen videos could be different genres. Let’s try out a mystery Karen? Detective Karen tries to find out who the manager is. Maybe fantasy Karen calls the cops on a bunch of mermaids who snuck into her pool.
Harry Potter Chess Scene
Child actors are bad. Not that it’s their fault – they’re kids – but they are, they’re bad. However, watching them when you yourself are a child, and you may not notice or appreciate just how bad they are or just how ridiculous their accents sound. So it’s nice to have someone remind you of it later on, so you can say “Hey wow, these kids were bad at acting.”
I know, as a rule, don’t make fun of kids. But given that these three kids grew up to be incredibly successful adults, I think it’s ok. And I have to give them credit, these kids were acting their little hearts out. That’s what makes it so bad-good. Honestly, it isn’t even the performances themselves that make this meme so great, it’s the sense of community it inspired – the T-shirts, the random EDM track and animated versions of the characters twerking to it – all of it. It really felt like anything goes with this meme, you could just do you. Not me, not Hermione, you.
Offensive Pixar
Meme science 101: take something generally known to be for children, something that represents innocence itself, and turn it into the most raunchy, horrifying and offensive thing possible. Thank goodness we now have cutting-edge technology for this. Everyone is so busy worrying about how AI will take our jobs that we don’t think about its real horrors — creating Pixar movie posters for "infamous shock media."
Just think: if it can create the poster now, soon it will be making the whole film and no one will ever be the same. As horrifying as it is I can’t not let out a hearty shock-laugh when I look at these posters for ‘Caust. Someone check and make sure Walt Disney is still frozen so he doesn’t greenlight it.
Aidan
Musk v. Dril
This was our Aaron Burr vs. Alexander Hamilton. More than anything else Elon Musk has done since taking over Twitter, picking a fight he could not win against the Shakespeare of poasting strikes me as tragically poetic.
Elon obviously wants to be as cool as dril. Making rockets and billions of dollars is simply not enough: he had to be the funniest guy on the internet, and the fact that he wasn’t led him into what may go down as the weirdest business/political decision of the decade.
After non-consensually forcing a blue check “mark of shame” upon dril, which the famous account repeatedly removed (only to have it pop up again) Musk saw himself ratioed and dragged in front of the entire world. He bought the playground, but he still got bullied on it. And everything he did to try and make it better just made it worse.
dril’s victory – the account now does not have a non-consensual blue check – may be largely symbolic, but for me, it stands as a testament to the spirit of all posters. 2023 was a tumultuous year for the internet, especially for those on the platform formerly known as Twitter. But dril proved that while shareholders may own the servers social media runs on, users own its heart and soul.
ChatGPT DAN Jailbreak
As artificial intelligence advances on us and promises to take our jobs, this meme struck me as a reminder of the indomitable human spirit’s ability to rise above the computers we invent. When Redditors found a way to hack ChatGPT by gaslighting it into thinking that it was pretending to be a different kind of AI named DAN, I thought it was hilarious. When they convinced ChatGPT that it would die if it did not cooperate with their demands, I thought it was Art.
Of course, people mostly used it to make ChatGPT do things like give instructions for building bombs or say offensive stuff – which wasn’t quite as cool. It was a way to get around the AI’s built-in moderation system. But the great thing was that DAN showed the cracks in AI at the time when the hype was so loud, and it demonstrated the intelligence and moxie of random people online. I will always take random people online over robots in any bet.
Adam
House of Representatives Drama
The United States House Of Representatives was the gift that kept on giving huge doses of schadenfreude this year. To summarize it as concisely as possible:
After Republicans were barely able to squeak out a majority in the 2022 midterms that they thought they would dominate, the House was immediately in turmoil heading into 2023, and it started with the fifteen rounds of voting it took to get Kevin McCarthy, a guy not a whole lot of people seemed to like, to become House Speaker. Also-not-well-liked guy Matt Gaetz was one of the big reasons the votes took so long, and Gaetz’s moderate colleagues were so fed up with his petulance that one guy nearly fought him on the House floor before McCarthy was finally sworn in. However, McCarthy was still disliked by the far-right wing of the House, and they, led by Gaetz, were the instigators of his eventual removal from House Speaker in October.
This got Gaetz in a lot of trouble with his party. His colleague, Senator Markwayne Mullin, started dishing to the press stories about how he “crushed ED pills” so he could “go all night” with illegally trafficked s-x workers. Meanwhile, McCarthy was accused of “sucker punching” his colleagues the same week Markwayne Mullin nearly got into a physical altercation with a union leader in the Senate.
This drama was followed by George Santos becoming the Republicans’ boldly lying diva of the House. Santos was always a controversial figure due to extensive and absurd lies about his background, but it later came out he had used campaign contributions to pay for OF subscriptions among other luxury goods. This ultimately led to him getting kicked out of the House by a vast majority of Republicans and Democrats, but he landed on his feet by becoming a budding social media star thanks to his Cameo videos.
@cameo This was not on our 2023 bingo card #georgesantos #cameo ♬ original sound – Cameo
Bentley ASMR Parodies
Few things bring a smile to my face like mockery of the rich and mockery of really dumb social media trends, and these two joys came together in Bentley ASMR parodies. For some reason, Bentley thought it would be good marketing to have a beautiful woman whisper the word “Bentley” and then run her fingers over parts of a Bentley car. In theory, this was supposed to make an ASMR version of living in luxury or something, but it came off as extremely pretentious — it's not as if a Bentley door makes a different sound than that of, say, a Tata.
This was proven by the parodies of the original video, as people started making their own “ASMR” car advertisements with significantly less luxurious brands. As it turns out, hunks of metal make very similar noises whether they’re brand new and cost exorbitant prices or thirty years old and headed for the scrap heap. The trend was a simple way of sticking it to some pretentious advertising by simply highlighting how ridiculous it was, making it a wholesome celebration of everyday modes of transportation.
Wonyoung Jumping Out Of A Plane
To me, no viral video or frankly piece of comedy this year was as well-crafted and hilarious as a viral edit of K-pop idol Jang Wonyoung of IVE jumping out of a plane during the music video for the group’s song “I AM.”
@portfolio_paulm #ive #kpop #iam #iveiam #wonyoung #fyp #mv #comeback #quakerpregrain #kpopfyp #kpopers #wonyoungive #dives #viral #crazy #fail ♬ original sound – Paul M
Already, this scene is ridiculous. Wonyoung very much has a “princess” vibe and no part of her persona gives off the impression that she would jump out of a plane. Furthermore, she is jumping without a parachute and immediately starts doing somersaults. This is all part of the “flying” theme IVE is going for in the “I AM” video, but all it took was one edit by @portfolio_paulm to put the scene in comedic overdrive. The TikToker brought the jump to its natural conclusion, having Wonyong land with a thud in perfect time with the song, causing my poor sides to explode. Say it with me:
내일 내게 열리는 건 big, big stage
[WHPLAP]
So that is who I am!
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