Meme Celebrities
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.
Most classic memes are drawings or film stills. But some of the best loved are photos of real people, taken on ordinary days, that escaped into the world and never came back. Here are nine of them - who they are, how it happened, and what they made of it. Each has their own story page, with videos of them telling it in their own words.
A deliberately terrible yearbook photo from Ohio, posted by a friend in 2012. Kyle turned the unluckiest face online into adverts, T-shirts and a $36,000 sale.
Bad Luck Brian: the yearbook photo that went wrong on purpose - Kyle Craven pulled a goofy face for his school picture in Ohio. Seven years later a friend posted it online, and the unluckiest boy on the internet was born.
A retired Hungarian engineer who modelled for stock photos, and whose smile everyone read as quiet despair. He embraced it - TEDx talk and all.
Hide the Pain Harold: the stock photo model who smiled through it - A retired Hungarian engineer posed for a few hundred stock photos. The internet looked at his smile and saw a man quietly falling apart.
An Italian actress asked to cry for a stock photo in Shanghai. She never saw a cent - and now writes films about the woman in the meme.
First World Problems: the actress who cried on cue - Silvia Bottini was asked to cry for a stock photo on a trip to Shanghai. Three years later her tears were the face of every trivial complaint online.
A joke entry for a Justin Bieber contest, one unblinking stare, and a YouTube career that followed.
Overly Attached Girlfriend: the stare that started a YouTube career - Laina Morris made a joke video for a Justin Bieber contest and stared into the camera a little too long. One frame of it became one of 2012's biggest memes.
A baby on a beach with a fist full of sand. Years later, the meme helped pay for his father's kidney transplant.
Success Kid: the beach photo that paid for a kidney - Laney Griner photographed her baby son on a beach with a fistful of sand. His triumphant face became the internet's symbol of small wins - and later helped save his father's life.
A photo his mother took at 16 made him the internet's worst roommate. He fought it, then rapped about it.
Scumbag Steve: the guy in the sideways cap - Blake Boston's mother took a photo of him at 16. Five years later the internet decided he was the worst roommate in the world.
Four years old, smiling in front of a training fire. In 2021 she sold the original for about $500,000 and paid off her student loans.
Disaster Girl: the smile in front of the fire - Zoë Roth was four when her father photographed her grinning in front of a burning house. The fire was a training exercise; the smirk became immortal.
The one runner in the race who looked like a model. He called it the most flattering way to go viral.
Ridiculously Photogenic Guy: the runner who looked too good - Everyone else in the race looked exhausted. Zeddie Little looked like he was in an advert. One photo made him the internet's most handsome stranger.
A childhood Polaroid with an armful of Goosebumps books gave the internet a whole new accent.
Ermahgerd: the girl with the Goosebumps books - Two friends with a Polaroid camera staged a nerdy photo shoot in the late 1990s. Thirteen years later it gave the internet a whole new way of talking.
It's worth remembering, when you create a post with one of these memes, that there's a real person behind the picture. The best posts laugh with them, not at them.
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.
- 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.