About

What We Did Before Memes refers to a series of viral jokes about how people would fill their time before they shared memes online.

Origin

On June 17th, 2019, Twitter user @wokestbloke tweeted,^[1] "Y’all don’t know what it was like before memes. One joke from Billy Madison had to last you like 5 years." Within four days, the tweet received more than 21,000 likes and 4,500 retweets (shown below).

Precursor

Prior to this tweet, the question had been posted numerous times on Twitter. For example, on August 15th, 2011, Twitter^[2] user @hexsteph tweeted, "What was life before memes" (shown below).

Spread

On June 18th, Twitter user @broazay tweeted,^[3] "before memes, guys used to sit around in a circle and loudly quote Anchorman at each other for literal years." The tweet received more than 62,000 likes and 8,100 retweets in three days (shown below, left). That day, they also shared the @wokestbloke tweeted, writing, "I hadn’t seen this tweet, but I’ve now sent it to a bunch of my buddies."

Following the post, others seemed to agree and share other movies that they would quote prior to using memes. Twitter^[4] user @harmongreg tweeted, "And for old school traders it was CaddyShack" (shown below, right).

Others posted variations on the joke, adding their own "before meme" activities. Twitter user @jonnysun wrote, "before memes existed people never had a socially acceptable and destigmatized way to say 'i’m sad' to each other." Thet tweet^[5] received more than 5,100 likes and 740 retweets in 24 hours (shown below).

On June 20th, Twitter^[6] published a Moments page on the tweets.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References