History
Advice animals: the colour-wheel years
A dog in front of a rainbow wheel started a whole family of characters, each with one personality and one job. How Advice Dog's descendants took over the internet around 2010.
Around 2006, a picture of a smiling puppy in front of a colour wheel started turning up on forums with terrible advice written on it. Advice Dog was the first of what people came to call advice animals: an animal - and later a person - with one fixed personality, centred on a background of coloured wedges, giving the world the advice that personality would give.
The idea multiplied fast. Courage Wolf gave aggressive motivation. Insanity Wolf gave the same advice gone horribly wrong. Socially Awkward Penguin, from a nature photo of a penguin turning away, became the voice of everyone who has ever waved back at someone who was waving at the person behind them.
Socially Awkward Penguin: Socially Awkward Penguin is a photo of a penguin waddling sideways against a blue backdrop.
A character, not a joke
The genius of the format is that the picture is a character you already know. You don't need to explain anything: put a caption over Scumbag Steve in his sideways cap and readers know the story will end with someone being taken advantage of. Put the same story over Good Guy Greg and it ends with a favour.
Advice animals turned the meme into a cast. Philosoraptor thinks too hard. Confession Bear admits what nobody else will. Business Cat runs a company the way a cat would. Each new character arrived with a job, and the job was the joke.
Their golden age
Between about 2009 and 2013 these were the internet's main way of telling jokes, with communities devoted to nothing else and this site turning out millions of posts. They've since been joined by newer formats, but the characters are still recognised everywhere - and still being captioned here every day.
More stories
- What is a meme, anyway? - A word a biologist made up in 1976 now names the internet's favourite kind of joke. How a picture and two lines of text became a language millions of people speak.
- Top text, bottom text: the grammar of a meme - White capital letters with a black outline, one line above the picture, one below. Every part of the classic meme layout is doing a job.
- Rage comics: when the internet drew itself in MS Paint - Wobbly lines, a handful of faces and one big feeling per panel. The crude comics that gave us Trollface, Forever Alone and Y U No.
- Meme Celebrities: the people behind the faces - A yearbook photo, a stock photo shoot, a day at the beach. Nine ordinary people who woke up one morning to find their face had become a joke the whole world knew.
- From the big screen to the top text - A line from The Lord of the Rings, a smirk from 1971, a beer advert and a squinting cartoon. How film and TV became the internet's favourite raw material.
- Beyond two lines: panels, boxes and captions - Top and bottom text is only one way to caption a picture. The newer formats put words in boxes, beside panels or above the image - and you can make all of them here.
- How to make a meme that lands - Pick the right face, follow its formula, keep it short and be specific. Five rules from the millions of posts made on this site.