Popular Memes 2018: These Are the Memes That Defined the Last Year

"One taught me love / one taught me patience / and one taught me pain/." Ariana taught me to mine those heartbreaks for content. 

Since memes swept onto the digital landscape over a decade ago, our favorite, crudely photoshopped images have evolved from things you text your friends to make them laugh to the de facto medium for cultural criticism. So it’s only right that, in evaluating the past year - the good, the bad and the racist - we look to memes that defined 2018.

The term “meme,” though it sounds like a word plucked straight from early aughts vernacular, was actually coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, in the book The Selfish Gene. “Meme” is meant to embody the way ideas can spread like genes, replicating, evolving and entering public culture. Sometimes, the replication can get out of hand. Sometimes, the gene’s evolution is toxic.

But while memes are being increasingly used as political weapons, they’re also opportunities for us to take ownership over the media that inundates us constantly. In manipulating images, from screenshots of movie trailers to newly labeled stock photo images, we impose our own ideologies, our own frameworks, our own humor and our own opinions onto content. And suddenly, the media becomes more familiar. It becomes a little bit more “ours.”

“I just wanted to get another look at you”

Even before the mega-hit A Star Is Born hit theaters in early October, meme culture scooped up this chef’s kiss of a scene featuring a very sweaty Bradley Cooper leaning out of a car window — yelling “Hey!” — and a very smug Lady Gaga smiling knowingly. By replacing the dialogue, memologists parodied a host of scenarios, from the romaine-apocalypse to the number of times people re-watched A Star Is Born while crying alone in the theater.

 The Change My Mind Sign

After conservative podcaster Steven Crowder posted up outside Texas Christian University this February, seated behind a table that read, “Male privilege is a myth. Change my mind,” the internet hungrily set to re-titling Crowder’s table with all sorts of philosophical challenges. Perhaps more than any other meme this year, Change My Mind captured the entitlement of “debate me” culture, which assumes that any one, at any time, must be willing to engage in bad-faith debates or otherwise admit being wrong.

“My Momma said”

Once a childhood photo of Cardi B began making the rounds this fall, it was only a matter of time before people began capitalizing on the now-iconic image of Young Belcalis staring bossily at the camera. How do succinctly roast someone? Tell ‘em your momma said to.

BBQ Becky

BBQ Becky was just one in a series of “white women calling the police over literally nothing” memes that have dominated the news cycle over the past several years. From BBQ Becky, which focused on a woman who called the police on a group of African-American people grilling in the park, to Permit Patty seen in the image above, the meme became a cathartic way to talk about issues like over-surveillance and police brutality.

“Is this a…”

In the original scene from a 1990s anime show The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird, a humanoid character mistakenly identifies a butterfly as a pigeon. And in that spirit, one of very genuinely, very confidently identifying something incorrectly, the “Is this a…” meme served as a way to make fun of internet hyperbole.