The Week's Best Memes, Ranked
Here at Digg, we try our best to cover the most important and confounding memes that come across the timeline. But the web is littered with tons of great memes that never quite hit the mainstream, instead bouncing around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.
Enter: our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked. For the week of February 3rd, we have a few contenders: Nancy Pelosi ripping the SOTU, Kylo Ren screaming, Bernie Sanders writing and the 62%.
4. Nancy Pelosi Ripping The SOTU
The meme: It's been quite a week in politics: not only did we go through the catastrophe that was the Iowa caucus, but we also had a memorable moment during Trump's State of the Union address when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up her copy of Trump's speech after he had delivered the speech. The video of Pelosi tearing the speech in half has instantly become a meme, with many people appropriating the moment for comedic purposes.
Examples
Verdict: Last year, Pelosi's response to Trump's State of the Union speech, a clap that many read as sarcastic, broke the internet with its weird combination of restraint and contempt. This year Pelosi's response is definitely more dramatic and has given us plenty of fodder to skewer the ludicrousness that is our current political situation. And much like the Iowa caucus meme, when life verges on parody and gives you lemons, we might as well make some memes.
Pang-Chieh Ho
3. Kylo Ren Screaming Lyrics
The meme: The State of the Scene podcast posted a Twitter prompt involving a photo of Adam Driver as his villainous Star Wars character Kylo Ren in an intense rage and asked what song lyric he was "about to scream."
Many folks obliged and provided captions of the leader of the First Order belting out hilariously unlikely lyrics.
Examples:
The verdict: 2019 was a big year for Adam Driver meme-wise, with many of his fans captioning his famous wall-punching scene from "Marriage Story" and his iconic visage continues to resonate into 2020, but with "The Rise of Skywalker" having less of a cultural impact as the previous Star Wars installments, it's unclear how much traction this one will get. Kudos to Netflix for the synergy though.
James Crugnale
2. Bernie Drawing Stuff
The meme: There are few unwritten internet rules stronger than "if you post a picture of a whiteboard, people are going to photoshop it." Bernie Sanders is the latest public figure to whiteboard himself, with an image of him writing on a board circulating on social media. What kinds of things would it be funny for Bernie to write? Mostly stuff that high schoolers would write:
Examples:
Want to meme it yourself? Here's a blank template:
The verdict: With Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight rating Bernie Sanders as the favorite for the Democratic nomination — and with Sanders' large online fanbase — expect to see a lot of Sanders-based memes over the coming months. It's early to say how the whiteboard meme will stack up, but it's infinitely reusable and there's a ton of comedy to be mined from Bernie writing weird/inappropriate stuff. Good meme.
Dan Fallon
1. The 62%
The meme: Following the Iowa caucuses on Monday, there was some app trouble — a mishapp, if you will (though you really don't have to) — such that the results were not delivered in as timely a fashion as they usually are. Ordinarily the results, which give us a rough idea of the leading party candidates, are shared with the public by the end of the night of the caucuses. This year, the Iowa Democratic Party decided to use a brand-new, untested mobile app to count votes. Things did not go well, and no results were released Monday night.
By Tuesday, the IDP said they were finally releasing results — but only…62% of them. Which left us with a lot of questions, and a lot of jokes.
Examples:
There were subcategories of 62% jokes, too, like the multitude of jokes about watching 62% of a movie:
Or finishing 62% of a book:
There were some choice mashups with other good memes:
And then just some exhausted, too-real takes:
Verdict: Did Twitter have a meltdown? Yes. But also, amid the arguably much more insidious divisions that the caucuses caused within the Democratic party, for a few brief and beautiful moments, this meme brought us together. Maybe only like, say, 62% together, but that's enough to go on, isn't it?
Molly Bradley
The 2020 Meme Power Ranking
Click each entry on the ranking to see when it debuted.
- Baby Yoda
- As A Treat
- Bernie Sanders memes
- Large Boulder/Small Boulder
- 62%
- This Is How I Win
- OK Boomer
- Italian AOC Hand Emoji
- Kylo Ren screaming
- The Girl Drinking Kombucha Reaction GIF
Baby Yoda is so powerful that Planters blew up their brand to launch the (terrifying) BabyNut:
