When Shegets Knocked Down but Get Up Again Meme

This was a mess of a summertime. This was the summer of Suicide Team, and that play about grown-up Harry Potter, and a seemingly endless string of horrific globe events, and record high temperatures, and La Croix-themed birthday cakes, and Trump. And there was no song of the summertime this yr. No glittery pop confection, no windows-down hip-hop, no elegy to lost love that was well-suited to a social club version with a sick drop. Nothing. No Fetty Wap, no "Summertime Sadness (Dance Remix)" no "Phone call Me Maybe," not even a "Payphone."

instead of music, we got memes

What did we take this summertime? Memes! In some ways, memes are amend than music. Music reminds you that y'all have a soul, and serotonin receptors in your brain. Music is emotion rattling around your head. This isn't really the summer for that. At worst, memes remind you that everything is a joke and you should keep laughing until your trunk physically overtakes the controls and powers down. Only at best, they are communal creative acts, people from beyond the land or the planet working together to spread ephemeral nuggets of joy.

So, I enquire, in a question I hope volition before long exist as simultaneously hotly contested and utterly meaningless as "What is the vocal of the summer?": "What is the meme of the summer? TM KAITLYN TIFFANY"

Before we get to the official meme of the summer, allow's review the runners-up month by month.

June

"She doesn't have the range"

"She doesn't have the range" had a reign that was brusque and sweet, just similar its style of pop criticism. Information technology probably could have lived a much longer life if content creators similar me had the range.

"Delete your business relationship"

This is an old Twitter joke that briefly saw daylight once again because of the social media squad of Hillary Clinton. People loved it, but resurfacing an old meme for a sweet lilliputian moment in the feeble suns of early June does not a meme of the summer make.

#tealizard

Tea cadger was a hoax, you guys. I will not reward dishonesty with an extremely important and very real title that comes with cash prizes and a place in America's textbooks for generations to come.

Dat boi

I'm not sure how to explain dat boi'southward decline to you considering it'due south such a great meme, but I'm trying to exist an impartial judge. For that reason, and no other, I must inform you a meme experiencing its dying breaths can non sit atop the winner's podium. It may exist a case of called-for brilliant and burning fast, a visual "damn, Daniel" that was called upon and so oft in such a short period of fourth dimension that we spent it prematurely. Oh god, now I'1000 thinking almost the scene in The Lovely Bones, in which Mark Wahlberg yells at his daughter, a young Saiorse Ronan, for using up all her expensive film in i weekend, and so she gets murdered the next day. Bad dad! Bad moving picture! Good meme! Simply non expert plenty.

Someone texted this to The Verge's Nick Statt the other day.

July

Dabbing frog

The dabbing frog and I have similar life stories, in that we have both gone through periods of farthermost popularity (the calendar week after I met Neil Patrick Harris, when I was the merely one in my dorm with a auto) and periods of anybody literally forgetting nosotros exist (2007-2012).

Graham

Unfortunately the heretofore infallible data scientific discipline tool Google Trends doesn't have any style to differentiate Graham the odd man-baby doll from Graham of "Nabisco Grahams" or Graham of Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. This is a scientific investigation, so Graham, I'm pitiful. Pack your incredible bod and get.

Taylor Swift is a ophidian

Despite the enthusiasm with which the web declared #TaylorSwiftisOver and #TaylorSwiftisDead, information technology seems like what'due south really over and expressionless is our fury with her.

Bill Clinton'southward balloons

Like all joy, this meme lasted only as long as it took for Donald Trump to speak again.

August

Arthur fist

PBS commented on this meme, virtually killing it, every bit you lot can see from the precise scientific discipline to a higher place. It recouped some of its losses and shot back up, and then it technically represents a contender for meme of the summer. However, I was on holiday during Arthur fist's highest zenith and can't accurately say how much joy it provided to anyone without doing a long and bothersome poll.

"I haven't heard that proper noun in years"

Edgar Allen Poe? haven't heard that name in years moving picture.twitter.com/eJ4ZmqRxEv
— sydney (@sydlol) August 8, 2016

I love this joke, but Google Trends keeps telling me "Oops! Something went incorrect," which I'1000 bold is a data tool's diplomatic way of telling me that no ane else cares.

"This is non fine"

Wow, seems like for a very brief period of time, anybody realized that nothing was fine. Then the Olympics started and we were completely distracted from our moment of clarity. Has anyone read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire? Has anyone seen Michael Phelps' cupping marks? I'g distressing, what were we talking about?

Phelps face up

Overruled, under the fundamental law that "sports" memes are the about ephemeral of all memes, one day of sports constantly giving way to the next twenty-four hour period of sports.

THE MEME OF THE Summer

It all comes down to 3 heavyweights who take barely left pop civilisation's collective mouth for a single second these terminal 90 days of crippling humidity and extreme surrealism.

Donald Trump

Trump can't really be the meme of the summertime because, while he has been popular for the about of the summer, he'southward dropped off hard in Baronial. Not only that, merely memes are supposed to brand yous happy, not "deplorable!"

Harambe

This chart actually tells a story. The story is: a gorilla died, and people were upset. Later, people gradually became comfy with making jokes about the gorilla's death. Somewhen the jokes stopped being jokes and started being the word "HARAMBE" thrown out as a non sequitur to elicit a laugh because it'south a funny word and teenagers loves discomfort comedy.

Harambe has already been declared the meme of the summertime past one-half a dozen other meme scholars, merely most of them declared Harambe a symptom of something incorrect with social media, or outrage culture, or an uncomfortable societal tendency to feel more pity toward animals than our countrymen. Memes aren't a symptom; memes are a cure. As well, let's be real: kids are screaming Harambe because it's edgy, non because they're commenting on the human condition.Further, I think if I said "Harambe" to my grandmother she would almost definitely know what I was talking almost, which is lame. And she would be sad, which is double lame.

"Don't talk to me or my son ever again"

You may detest me, you may even disagree, but "don't talk to me or my son ever once again" is the meme of the summer. It has legs — information technology was the second set of footprints beside on the beach of this long hot death march. Information technology has whimsy — to this solar day I don't call back I've found anyone (myself included) who can accurately explicate information technology. Nosotros may know its origins, but nosotros will never know its soul. A grouping of Redditors briefly tried, and this is what they came upwardly with:

And yet it's funny, and a perfect explanation for any image in which at that place are ii objects, one larger than the other. Long live our summer jam, "don't talk to me or my son ever again."

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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/12/12426820/memes-summer-2016-arthur-dat-boi-harambe