The 25 best memes of all time

Os memes didn't start alongside the Web 25 years ago. This word that today is so used and explored comes from the Greek "mimeme” (imitate something) and was defined by biologist Richard Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene”, a book published in 1976.

According to him, “mimeme is a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation”, like Giovana's ovens and “wow, man, what a madness! How stupid are you”, by Caetano Veloso.

While these are current memes, none of this would be possible without the Web as we know it today. The website Know Your Meme confirmed that there are more than 2600 of them. Below are the 25 best internet memes in their first 25 years.

01. Dancing baby

1996: the flight of memes from Internet. O baby dancing to "Hooke on a Feeling", appeared several times in Ally McBeal episodes. The file was originally made with one of the first 3D software. LucasFilm developers modified this video before it was shared around the world and it was compressed into one of the first GIFs in history. Exciting, no?

02. Hamster Dance

1998: Okay, the guys who are now 30 years old really liked a nice little dance, didn't they? Proving that GIFs deserved the stardom, a Canadian art student made a page with 392 hamster gifs; a tribute to your pet. As if the infectious dancing wasn't enough, the background music is a fast-paced version of Roger Miller's “Whistle Stop”.

03. Peanut Butter Jelly Time

2001:  Hit of hits. Peanut Butter JellyTime is a flash animation – which Steve Jobs decided to kill off ten years before it was over – of an 8-bit banana dancing. This video became an interweb phenomenon in the early 2000s. The catchy song was written and performed by the rap group Buckwheat Boyz.

04. All Your Base Are Belong To Us

2001: For game fans, this meme echoed through the four corners of the ancient internet. All Your Base Are Belong To Us originated from a scene cut from the Japanese game “Zerowing”. The bad translation of the sentence is what made this meme persist for all these years.

05. The Star Wars Child

2002: The first large-scale victim of cyberbullying. Ghyslain Raza, without discussion, became a meme based on a video that he uses a baseball bat as a weapon to make funny moves as if he were fighting Darth Maul in "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace". O star wars kid showed the world that privacy on the internet is not guaranteed for anyone.

06. Spongmonkeys

2003: before turning spokesthings of Quiznos, two “Spongmonkeys” singing became a true viral doomed to stardom, after appearing in a b3ta newsletter, a pre-link and with an image sharing site. The opening song starts, of course, with “We like the moon”.

07. Num Num

2004: I just had the biggest throwback of all. If anything means having lived the anos 2000, clearly this song is in the top 3. Remember the hit here.

08. THE RLY

2005:  This doesn't need contextualization. O meme originally appeared on the 4chan website community. The owl's open eye was used as a way of showing sarcasm, becoming a predecessor to other reaction memes.

09. Facts about Chuck Norris

2005:  Chuck Norris was on the internet the "first most interesting man in the world“, crowned with the mythical avatar of a man who has supernatural strength, attitude and a unique personality. Memes like “There is no theory of evolution”, as one of the facts says, “only a list of creatures that Chuck Norris allows to live”. Well, we already know that.

10. I Can Has Cheezburger?

2007: Memes based on animals are amazing, but the blog “I Can Have Cheezburger", which has a mascot hungry british cat, turned all other memes into the mainstream. The site was created by Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami.

11. Rickroll

before the clickbait, there was Rickroll. Popularized on 4chan, the meme regarding Rick Astley's music, made his victim during a session of the Oregon Chamber and even in White House Twitter feed.

12. Success Kid

2007:  Based on a photo of Sammy Griner's mother Laney posted on Flicker when he was just 11 months old, the meme describes one thing that goes better than expected. In 2015, Sammy's fame helped the family raise $100 to fund a transplant for his father Justin.

13. Dramatic Squirrel

2007: Okay, this is one of the classics. O dramatic squirrel is an five second video of the animal with its back to the camera, turning its face with an air of amazement.

14. Philosoraptor

2008: Another gem from the internet. O philosoraptor it's the meme of thoughtful dinosaur, pondering about life and thinking about the existing paradoxes. Totally gold.

15. Deal With It

2010: In this GIF, sunglasses fall in a very cool way on a dog's face. This was like an emoticon on the SomethingAwful forums for a while, but then it became a meme with because Dump.fm ran a contest encouraging people to create their own versions of the sunglasses appearing on someone's face. Let Aécio and Dilma say so in the 2014 elections.

16. Hide your children, hide your wife

2010: "So you all need to hide your children, hide your wives and hide your husbands, because they are raping everyone out there," he said. Antoine Dodson emphatically to a TV reporter, after a person tried to attack his sister. The video quickly spread across the internet on YouTube, having been created several versions and remixes of that speech.

17. Nyan Cat

2011: The combination of an animation in 8-bit of a cat (originally dubbed “Pop-Tart Cat”), with the insanely catchy song “nyanyanyanyanyanya!” burst YouTube, becoming the fifth most viewed video of 2011, inspiring fan illustrations, designs and games.

18. Ermahgerd

2012:  Originally as "Gersberms… mah favrit berks” and then as “BERKS!”, the text superimposes the supposed speech of a woman holding books in a very funny way.

19. Brian the Unlucky

2012: what a annual school photo can do with a boy? Well, in Kyle Craven's case, the internet made him famous. His friend Ian Davies posted a picture of Kyle at school on Reddit, with the writing: “Stopped the driver's license exam…. earns his first DUI (driving under the influence of a substance).”

20. Angry Cat (aka Grumpy Cat)

A original photo from Tardar Sauce received another one from a million views on Imgur for the first two days. The meme spread through books, comics, and even a contract with Friskies, cat food, and a Christmas special called "Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever“, with Aubrey Plaza providing the voice of the cat.

21. Ridiculously Photogenic Face

2012:  A photo of a handsome runner was posted on Reddit on the 3rd of April and gained over 40 thousand votes. Derivatives like “Riculously Photogenic Metalhead”, “Riculously Photogenic Syrian Rebel” make humanity wonder why we look so bad in photos and other people look so good.

22. Doge

2013:  In February 2010, a kindergarten teacher in Japan posted photos of Kabuso, her adopted shiba inu dog on her personal blog. And just like who doesn't want anything, a meme was created. It is usually accompanied by some crappy English, in comic sans font, representing a monologue.

23. Michael Jordan crying

2014:  A basketball star got emotional during his 2009 Hall of Fame speech. 2014, meme makers used a Associated Press photo with Jordan's face at various times unbelievable fail of people and situations. great!

24. Ice Bucket Challenge

2014: 2014 was the year people thought it would be cool to play a bucket full of ice on own head. If this has always existed or if it was created at a certain time, it is not known, but the internet took advantage of it… oh, it took advantage of it! But at the same time, one association raised over 100 million dollars thanks to a discovery of scientists.

25. Left shark

2015:  Here we come to an end; or rather, in the beginning. During the interval of Last Year's Super Bowl, Katy Perry performed alongside two dancing sharks. One did what had to be done. The other, well, what was he doing anyway? Oh yes, turning into an internal sensationt.

Source: Washington Post