The Internet's Greatest Memes: A Field Guide to Ten That Refused to Die

A meme is a joke with no author, which is a polite way of saying it is a joke with an author who was never asked. Ten of them follow. Each one has a full write-up of its own, each one lasted at least a decade, and every one of them has a person or an animal at the centre who had no plan to be there. Let’s kick things off with the one you are still not safe from.

The Rickroll (2007)

A bait link that delivers a 1987 Stock Aitken Waterman single instead of whatever it promised. It works because the payload is good, and it survives because it is a mechanism rather than a joke. Rick Astley, retired at the time, found it funny, rickrolled a live parade audience in 2008, and turned it into a second touring career. Full write-up here.

Doge (2013)

A Japanese rescue Shiba Inu named Kabosu, photographed on a sofa by her owner in 2010, surrounded by broken English in Comic Sans. It produced a parody cryptocurrency that stopped being a parody, a four million dollar sale of the original photograph in 2021, and a genuine international mourning period when Kabosu died in 2024. Full write-up here.

Nyan Cat (2011)

A pixel cat with a toaster pastry for a torso, flying through space trailing a rainbow, welded by strangers to a looping Japanese vocal track. Nobody involved was collaborating. Chris Torres, who drew the cat, sold a remastered version as an NFT in 2021 for roughly half a million dollars, ten years late. Full write-up here.

Grumpy Cat (2012)

Tardar Sauce, a cat whose feline dwarfism and underbite produced a permanent expression of disgust with the world. She became a licensing operation, a film, a waxwork, and the winner of a lawsuit that awarded her company roughly $710,000 over an iced coffee product. She died in 2019. Full write-up here.

Distracted Boyfriend (2017)

A Spanish stock photograph with three clearly separated actors and three fillable labels, which turned it into a diagram for every want anybody has ever had. Sweden’s advertising ombudsman ruled a recruitment ad using it sexist in 2017, producing the only regulatory document in this article. Full write-up here.

The Dancing Baby (1996)

The oldest entry, and a sample file that escaped. It shipped as a demo for 3D animation software, spread worldwide by email attachment before the web could carry video, and ended up as a recurring hallucination on Ally McBeal. Everything after it owes it the basic proof that media can travel with no publisher at all. Full write-up here.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us (1991)

Nine words from a rushed translation in the opening cutscene of Zero Wing, resurrected in 2001 as a remixed video that put the phrase into photographs of the real world. It embarrassed an entire industry into taking localisation seriously, which is a rare measurable outcome for a joke. Full write-up here.

Success Kid (2007)

An eleven-month-old on a beach with a clenched fist, universally read as triumph and actually a fistful of sand. In 2015 the family raised roughly a hundred thousand dollars towards a kidney transplant for his father, funded largely by people who had been using the image free for a decade. Full write-up here.

Hide the Pain Harold (2011)

András Arató, a Hungarian electrical engineer who did a stock photo shoot and found his face turned into the global symbol of suppressed misery. He tried to stop it, failed, and then took the character over completely, which got him a TEDx talk, advertising work and a late-career audience. Full write-up here.

Disaster Girl (2005)

Zoë Roth, aged four, smiling at her father’s camera in front of a controlled burn in North Carolina. She grew up as a reaction image, then sold the original photograph as an NFT in 2021 for around half a million dollars while keeping the copyright. Full write-up here.

What They Have in Common

Not humour. Several of these are barely jokes. What they share is a shape that can carry a meaning the original never had: a face with no fixed context, a sentence with a blank in it, a loop with no end. The specific content is almost incidental, which is why a mistranslated shooter and a sofa photograph of a dog can occupy the same category.

The other thing they share is a person who did not choose this. A four-year-old at a fire. A baby eating sand. An engineer at a photo shoot. A retired singer. Three of the ten eventually got paid, two of those in a brief strange crypto window that has since closed, and the rest were public property for free.

Our advice, unchanged since 2015: enjoy the joke, and remember there is a person on the other end of it who is going to be answering questions about this at parties for the rest of their life.