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 and instead just bounce around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.
Enter our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked. This week, we've got Airbnb won't refund me for the Satanic house I stayed in, One Gotta Go, gender reveal parties, "once said" and summer fun.
5. Summer Fun 🏝❤️
The meme
Last Friday, actor Daniel Newman, whose claim to fame is a 10-episode stint on The Walking Dead, tweeted a photo of a possible superspreader event — er, I mean, a summer getaway with tons of other white guys — with the caption, "Summer fun! 🏝❤️ (*private island all tested negative multiple times wear a mask❤️)." Except, uh, the photo shows 26 people clustered together with nary a mask in sight.
This comes after Newman himself had published an op-ed in the New York Times detailing his own likely coronavirus experience. "My biggest fear is that I have passed whatever illness I have on to someone," he wrote in March.
Newman deleted the tweet, but the memes pairing his stream-of-consciousness caption with other ridiculous group photos are here to stay.
Examples
Jon-Michael Poff
4. One Gotta Go
The meme
One Gotta Go has long been a party game for netizens, with people pitting their favorite TV shows/R&B artists/fast food places against one another. Most recently, interest in the prompt spiked when someone on Twitter had people vote off their least favorite esoteric punctuation mark (clearly, the ellipses, right?).
Inspired others put together their own humorous quadrants of things that should "go."
Examples
James Crugnale
3. Gender Reveal Parties
The meme
On Monday, a pyrotechnic device at a gender reveal party was revealed to be the cause of a California wildfire that has burned over 10,000 acres of land. The incident has reignited debates around gender reveal parties and how these events have, in addition to reinforcing antiquated ideas about gender, also led to disasters and death.
After news of the wildfire's cause broke, Twitter was flooded with memes roasting gender reveal parties for their ridiculousness and jokingly holding them responsible for other cataclysmic events, such as the Hindenburg disaster.
Examples
BJ Pang-Chieh Ho
2. Once Said
The meme
Cut over the Nintendo Wii theme song, tweeted quotes from actors and TV and movie characters merge with footage of said quotes to form audio-visual masterpieces that'll either provoke a nostalgia-induced chuckle or make you cringe.
Examples
Adwait Patil
1. Airbnb Won't Refund Me For The Satanic House I Stayed In
The meme
Warning: the context around this meme is still playing out; the discourse is ongoing. I'll try to sum it up as it stands, but at the end of the day, I'm just here for the memes, man.
Early this week, @FredTJoseph tweeted about the hellish time he had trying to get a refund from Airbnb for lodging he claimed had been mischaracterized in the listing.
And yesterday, Vice published an article all about it. They spoke to the owners of the Airbnb about the alleged Satanic and/or witch-related items. It seemed, ultimately, a matter of interpretation: the guest claimed there were "ritualistic markings" on the floors; the host said they were paint smudges. The guest saw Satanic sacraments; the host called them candles and the odd salacious statuette.
Long story short, the issue has been made very public and has taken over Twitter, where as many people side with the Airbnb host as with the guest. And then there are the heroes, who have meme-ified the original tweet about the supposedly Satanic house with alternate images.
Examples
Look, this year has been ridiculous enough without throwing Satanic panic in the mix. If you encounter any ritual-adjacent and/or haunted items in your lodging, just turn them around to face the wall.
Molly Bradley
And if you're hungry for more memes, here's last week's "The Week's Best Memes, Ranked" article, where we rank cancelling Van Gogh, I hope this email finds you well, Antifa HQ and education is vital.