Meme Literacy 101

The word meme is older than the internet. Biologist Richard Dawkins coined it in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, for an idea that spreads from person to person and mutates along the way, a bit like a gene. He was talking about catchphrases and fashion trends. The internet just made it fast.

How to read a meme

Almost every meme is a template (the image or format) plus a caption (the new joke). The trick is that the template carries a meaning of its own. If you don't know what the template means, you don't get the joke. Here are the ones you have to know.

The templates

Drake, no / Drake, yes: Two panels from Drake's "Hotline Bling" video (2015). In the top one he turns away (rejecting the thing), and in the bottom one he points and smiles (approving the better thing). Sometimes called "Drakeposting".

Distracted Boyfriend: A 2015 stock photo by Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem that went viral in 2017. A guy turns to check out another woman while his girlfriend glares at him. The guy is you, the girlfriend is what you should be doing, and the other woman is the temptation.

This Is Fine: A cartoon dog sipping coffee in a room that's on fire, from KC Green's webcomic Gunshow (2013). It means pretending everything's okay when it very much isn't.

Woman Yelling at a Cat: A 2019 mashup of a crying, pointing woman from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and a confused white cat named Smudge sitting at a dinner table. It's for any argument where one side is losing it and the other is completely unbothered.

Is This a Pigeon?: An anime character pointing at a butterfly and asking if it's a pigeon. The screenshot is from a 1991 Japanese anime. It's for confidently getting something completely wrong.

Doge: A photo of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, captioned in broken English ("such wow, very meme"). It even inspired the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Kabosu died in 2024 and got tributes from around the world.

NPC: From video games, where a non-player character just repeats the same lines. As an insult, it means someone with no original thoughts. (Yes, it's the bottom rank on this site. Climb out.)

The rickroll

The original bait-and-switch. You click a link expecting something, and it's Rick Astley's 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up". It started on 4chan around 2007. We're telling you before you press play, so technically this doesn't count.

How memes die

Memes have a life cycle:

1. Birth: a niche forum, a group chat, a TikTok with 200 views.
2. Peak: everyone's using it and it's funny.
3. Brand death: a bank, a fast-food chain or a politician posts it. It's over.
4. Ironic revival: years later it comes back as a joke about itself.

Then there's brain rot: deliberately nonsense content like Skibidi Toilet or the AI-generated "Italian brainrot" characters (Tralalero Tralala, Ballerina Cappuccina) of 2025. "Brain rot" was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2024.