Ed Ranks Memes (Part I)

Ranking Memes is obviously one of these.

Ah, memes! There are tons of them. Definitely a lot more than fifty. But I'm just going to stop at fifty, because that's already plenty. If your favorite meme isn't there... too bad. It's just not funny enough.

This is part one, consisting of Memes ranked #50 to #26. 

50. Loss (| || || |_) - Look, I get the "Loss" meme, mocking the Cntl+Alt+Delete comic strip. It's just not that funny. Don't try to tell me that I "don't get it," because I do.

49. Goatse - If you don't know this one, maybe you should Google Image Search it. With "Safe Mode" disabled. At work. Go ahead, do it. What are you, yellow?

48. Ancient Aliens Guy - There isn't much to this one. I'm leaving off a lot of so-called memes which are just one-for-one taken from television as "Isn't it funny how weird / eccentric / funny" this person/joke is. I usually like my "memes" to add something. The Ancient Aliens guy, as a meme, doesn't really add anything innovative. It's just "Oh hey, that guy on that show is an 'expert' but not really because he has crazy hair and just says 'Aliens did everything.' Funny, huh?"

47. Nope! Chuck Testa - This daxidermy commercial-based meme has its moment in the sun for a very short time about a decade ago. Then it vanished to the meme graveyard.

46. Surprised Pikachu - Pikachu makes a face that is like, "Whoa, I can't believe the shit I just saw." It's moderately funny.

Honestly... WTF?

45. Nyan Cat - Animal-based memes typically rate very high for me, as you'll soon see. Nyan Cat, though? Okay. A cat that is also a pop tart who flies in space from a rainbow. It's cute. It's odd. But it doesn't throw too much "funny" at me though. Although it is a bit on the earlier side, as memes go. A great example of what direction the internet would be taking for the second decade of the new millenium.

44. Roll Safe - Even if you don't know anything about Hood Documentary (which I didn't), you've probably seen the image of this guy pointing at his head as if he just had a super brilliant idea. The joke is always that the brilliant idea isn't that brilliant and is instead self-destructive or based on shit logic. It's usually worth a moderate guffaw.

43. Chocolate Rain - Chocolate Rain benefits from being "early" in the era of memes. It's earliness makes it memorable, as it came from a time when videos of weird randos weren't as prolific as they are now. This was never, even in its heyday, "funny." It was just strange and somehow became super viral before "viral" was even a term that people used.

42. Sweet Brown / Ain't Nobody Got Time for That - I understand that it's always problematic for the local news station to interview someone with the explicit intent to get some "wacky ghetto person" on camera for everyone to laugh at. This could go down there with the "Crichton Leprechaun" video, or the Charles Ramsay "Mac-Donalds" interview, but at least the internet remixes of Sweet Brown (auto-tuning and turning her interview into a song) made it a little more memorable and funny.

Now this song will be in your head... forever.

41. Bed Intruder / Antoine Dodson - Everything I just said for Sweet Brown? Rinse and repeat for "Bed Intruder," except that this one is a little bit funnier and the Bed Intruder song was HOT FIRE. Hide your kids, hide your wife.

40. Xzibit / Yo Dawg - Yo Dawg, I heard you like Ranks. So I put a rank in your rank so you can rank while you rank.

39. Bert is Evil - Do you remember this one? If you are young, you will not. If you thought any of the memes I mentioned above were "old," then this one is freaking NEOLITHIC. This bad boy dates to 1997, a solid 22 years ago. Basically it's just Bert from Sesame Street, but photo-shopped with evil figures like Hitler and Bin Laden, or into historic situations like the JFK Assassination. I thought this was hilarious when I was in High School and it was a solid decade before I ever even heard the word "meme." Still, this was a meme even if that term wasn't being widely used yet.

38. Damnit, Moon Moon - You know those "name maker" things where you take the first letter of your first name and the first letter of your last name to make a new name dedicated to whatever the theme is? Ah, well there once was a "Werewolf Name Generator," and alas the word "Moon" was in both sections, so someone whose first name began with "P" and last name with "W" would get "Moon Moon" as a result. Thus the mocking and image macros began, making fun of a very dumb wolf named Moon Moon.

Dunn dunn DUNNNNNN!

37. Dramatic Chipmunk - Dramatic Chipmunk was hilarious for a hot minute, and it got SUPER big. There were people in the office talking about it and emailing it around in a way I typically never saw normal people sharing Internet Memes up to that point. Of course, everyone knows it was a prairie dog and not a chipmunk, right? They couldn't even name this thing right.

36. Firestarter / Disaster Girl - This is just a picture of a little girl smiling menacingly while there is a raging fire in the background and firemen trying to put it out. Did she start the fire herself? Does she just enjoy the suffering of others? Whatever the truth behind the menacing smile, one thing remains clear - children are evil.

35. Picard Facepalm - Just a collection of various pictures of Captain Jean-Luc Picard facepalming when he hears something stupid. Basically, can be used as a reply to almost 70% of all things posted on message boards or Twitter.

Tide goes in, Tide goes out. You can't explain that.

34. Rage Comics - These  are actually quite popular and prolific. They include a number of pretty notable, poorly-drawn-in-MS-Paint stick figures or tracings of images such as the Rageguy, Trollface, Derp, Forever Alone Guy, Me Gusta, Yao Ming, etc.  Despite how prolific and important they are to "meme culture" (if such a thing exists), I don't really find any of them that particularly funny. The only exception would probably be the Neil deGrasse Tyson "Looks like We Got a Badass" meme, which is always a good message board/Twitter reply to some Bro.

33. Confused Nick Young / Blinking White Guy (TIE) - NBA player Nick Young made a very perplexed face when his mom called him a clown. That perplexed face is now the perfect response to post when something batshit crazy is happening or someone says something dumb as shit. UNLESS, OF COURSE... you prefer to go with Confused Nick Young's melanin-deprived cousin, the Blinking White Guy (Drew Scanlon), who just has a look of utter contempt mixed with confusion and disbelief at the stupid shit he just heard someone else say.  Both of these are SOLID MEMES.

32. 2 Girls, 1 Cup (and Reactions) - If you don't know what this is by now then... well... congrats for having your virgin eyes saved.  I have seen a tiny bit of this, but not much. Like everyone else, someone told me to watch it all the way through. I did not. Much better than the video itself though, are the reaction videos to people who were able to somehow make it all the way through. The look of shock and horror on their faces is funny. Or sometimes, they have totally different reactions.

31. It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!!! - If I have another conversation with someone who says that this "came from Family Guy," I will punch them in their face. It doesn't matter where I am. At work. In front of a cop. At a funeral. Wherever. This is another oldschool meme.

30. What Are Those? - This 2015 Vine video making fun of footwear could have easily gone the way of Chuck Testa (or, you know, like Vine itself) to be totally forgotten. Yet somehow it kept hanging on. Finally, it wound up in the Black Panther movie which made a bajillion dollars, so it doesn't look like it's going anywhere.

So magical

29. Double Rainbow - What does it mean?

28. Hide The Pain Harold - Hide the Pain Harold is a stock image guy of an older gentleman doing mundane tasks. But the face of the stock image model is, in almost every photo, showing a slight bit of awkward discomfort (like he needs to take a shit during the photo shoot, but doesn't want to be impolite to the photographer). It got big enough so that the "Harold" behind the photos (actually a Ukrainian electrical engineer) wound up doing Ted Talks. 

27. Spider-Man 1967 - The Animated 1967 to 1970 Spider-Man cartoon was weird, poorly animated, and psychedelic. Thus a lot of totally batshit crazy still frames and video clips are basically just bait for equally batshit crazy memes.

26. That's Racist! - A little kid who shouts "That's Racist!," taken from the MTV2 show Wonder Showzen. Can be used very prolifically on the internet in reply to things written by other people because, well, half of everything people write on the Internet is racist.