John Lennon's Assassination

Overview

John Lennon's Assassination refers to the death of The Beatles member John Lennon in December 1980 in New York City by his killer Mark David Chapman. Beginning around the early 2010s, Lennon's murder became a notable subject in memes, including image macros about what killed him, killing him again, POV roleplays about being the one who shot him or memes from the perspective of Chapman.

Background

On December 8th, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a Beatles fan who was allegedly upset by John Lennon's lifestyle and a comment years prior he made that The Beatles were "more popular than Jesus," went up to Lennon in New York City at the archway of his residence, The Dakota. After asking for his autograph earlier that day, Chapman returned to The Dakota later that night and shot Lennon in the back with a .38 snub-nosed pistol, killing him.

Developments

Lennon's Murder In Memes

The exact first meme to reference Lennon's murder is unknown, but such memes appeared online at least as early as 2011 as the public opinion of Lennon became more negative after knowledge of his domestic abuse and other facts were exposed. One of the first memes to seemingly support Chapman over Lennon was a cyberbully meme template that had Chapman's mugshot used as an avatar in a chatroom, writing a message to "bully" Lennon. The meme's original source was lost, but it was posted to Know Your Meme on October 25th, 2011, by user VintageVCR^[1] (shown below).

Memes about Lennon's assassination were seen sporadically for several years, with the most prominent examples made using an Advice Animal template of John Lennon made for the site MemeGenerator on July 27th, 2011^[2]. An example of this was uploaded^[3] anonymously to the website (shown below).

Around 2019, Lennon's assassination saw a notable resurgence as a topic in memes with newer formats being utilized. An example of this was uploaded to Facebook by the page JohnLennonYokoPosting2007^[4] on February 8th, 2019, using the Doge meme (shown below).

Memes about his death began to move cross-platform as well, as seen in the Doom Soundtrack Parody meme uploaded to the subreddit /r/Memes on August 27th, 2020, by Redditor^[5] universal_boner, gaining 50 upvotes in two years (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References