Screen
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.
Film and television hand meme-makers something precious: a face millions of people already know, frozen at the exact moment of a very particular feeling. Pause the right scene and you have a character ready to say anything.
One does not simply
In The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Sean Bean's Boromir warns that “one does not simply walk into Mordor”, making a circle with his fingers as he says it. The gesture and the line became a template for anything that turns out to be harder than it looks.
One Does Not Simply: One Does Not Simply comes from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), where Sean Bean's Boromir warns the Council of Elrond that "one does not simply walk into Mordor," forming a circle with his thumb and finger.
Condescending Wonka
Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka, from the 1971 film, has a half-smile so politely superior that it became the internet's voice of sarcasm. The top line repeats someone's proud claim; the bottom line agrees with it in a way that means the opposite.
Not sure if
Fry from Futurama, squinting with deep suspicion, asks the questions we all ask: is this the real download button, or a virus? Is that a capital i, or a lower-case L? Two lines, both starting “not sure if… or…”, and you have one.
The adverts and the films nobody quotes
Not every source is a classic. The Most Interesting Man in the World came from a beer advert campaign that began in 2006 - “I don't always drink beer, but when I do…”. Conspiracy Keanu is a still from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), used for the strange theories that keep you up at night. Morpheus never actually says “what if I told you” in The Matrix, but the meme made everyone remember that he did.
And Kermit the Frog, sipping tea in an advert, gave the internet its favourite way of pointing something out while pretending not to: but that's none of my business.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.