Barbie (2023), Girl Dinner, Roman Empires, and yacht-hunting orcas were microscopic glimmers of joy in last year’s memescape, grasping at relatability, connectivity, and misplaced optimism amid live-streamed global atrocities. This year, however, was different.
The disparate and chronically unserious nature of virality in 2024 stems from accepting an uncertain expiration date for our survival on a burning planet with no extinguisher in sight. Feeble and superficial connections over common interests and shared notions of 🎀girlhood🎀 were fun while they lasted, but they can no longer cover or even fog up the inscrutable fuckery around us, exacerbated by finger-wagging, virtue-signaling keyboard activism on your leftist friend’s private Instagram story.
The word “unhinged” has been colloquialized and thrown around a lot in the last few years, but it feels like an especially apt description for meme trends this year and the real-life events that spawned them. If you had told me last year that we’d be clowning on a vice presidential candidate over a rumor about being a couch violator, or that Charli XCX would put a cork in her Brat summer by endorsing Kamala Harris, or that an empty plastic water jug would become the symbol of student resistance, I probably would have asked you for your plug’s number and possibly a tarot card reading.
Now, after what feels like 1,000 lifetimes and a non-stop conveyor belt of evil Mad-Libs-style headlines condensed into a year, I get it. We’re throwing in the towel and going straight for the jugular after reaching our bullshit limit. There’s microplastics in my uterus, climate change is killing people by the tens of thousands, and the gunning down of a health insurance CEO has gotten more coverage than the umpteenth school shooting — there’s simply no room for sensitivity and preciousness anymore. Nothing is off limits.
So with that, here are the memes that encapsulated 2024, in (mostly) chronological order.
Willy’s Chocolate Experience
Kicking off 2024’s meme harvest was the Wonka-inspired nightmare that devastated hundreds of Scottish children and their parents, but entertained millions internationally. AI-generated marketing images for an event called Willy’s Chocolate Experience in Glasgow promised families live performances, a “pasadise of sweet teats,” “cartchy tuns,” “exarserdray lollipops,” and “catgacating.”
But at the actual event, which took place on February 24, children cried amid a jellybean scarcity and parents called the police. Refunds are still up in the air and the “experience” organizer Billy Coull has since been put on the sex offender registry. Meanwhile, web users tapped into their own world of pure imagination centering the forlorn Oompa Loompa actress, Kirsty Paterson, the face that launched a thousand memes.
While we certainly pointed and laughed at the time of this unfolding saga, looking back on it now, it feels like the entire year was a never-ending Willy’s Chocolate Experience considering the world and life we were promised versus what we got …
Water Jug of Justice
During the nationwide university student encampments in solidarity with Gaza last spring, students at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, went viral in April after one of them repeatedly drummed a riot police officer over the helmet with an empty five-gallon water jug. The hollow *bonk* sound, revered by many for its slapstick cartoonishness, along with the jug itself, became symbolic of the plucky student solidarity movement throughout the United States.
Northern Lights FOMO
The aurora borealis that swept through international skies last May satiated the wanderlust of many across North America, Asia, and Europe, but drew immense envy from everyone else. It was a cloudy night in New York City when the coveted lights danced above us, shooing away any lingering excitement from the solar eclipse as we stewed in new-found jealousy. We got our turn with the pretty colors on a clear but frigid night in October, but the salty sentiments from May were the ultimate coping mechanism.
Presidential Debate #1
So we’re up to the first Presidential debate for the 2024 race. That went about as well as it could have, with Trump referring to “Black jobs” being stolen by illegal immigrants (a claim that has been widely debunked) and calling Biden a Palestinian (🥴). Trump and Biden also exchanged some weird snipes about each other’s golf prowess, and there was an inadvertent advertisement for Adderall prescriptions, among other fever-dreamlike statements. In case you forgot, it only gets worse!
Donald Trump’s Ear
Donald Trump being shot was such a long time ago now, and ended up being old news pretty quickly in terms of media coverage and public reactions. The unseriousness I talked about earlier reared its head here, as you can see, in that the internet just meme’d the hell out of it. And then Biden dropped out of the race and uncorked a whole other dimension of delusion. Back to that shortly …
As an aside, I’ve had papercuts that took longer to heal and left bigger scars than Trump’s ear injury. Make of that what you will.
JD Vance Couch Allegations
We all heard the rumor that Vice President-elect JD Vance had sex with his couch as a horny teenager based on a troll post on X where some guy alleged that Vance recounted the story, including the use of an inside-out latex glove between two cushions, between pages 179 and 181 of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Despite being fact-checked almost immediately, the meme was cemented to Vance’s reputation — so much so that Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz even referenced it in a speech to attendees at one of the Harris rallies last August. Yikes …
Summer Olympics 2024
The 2024 Summer Olympic Games were rife with iconic moments. From the Turkish and Korean shooters eliciting both sheer impression and gay panic to the Australian breakdancer Raygun doing her 0-point-worthy routine featuring kangaroo hops, the cramp, and SpongeBob-like choreography, to the French pole vaulter whose ample nether regions cost him a medal, and swimmers getting sick from the Seine River, there’s really too much to ruminate on in this fever dream.
Justice for Jordan Chiles, though.
Coconut Tree Meets Brat
It’s mid-to-late July. Biden is out, Harris is in. The childhood Coconut Tree tale from a 2023 speech resurfaces in full force as a meme, and then goes triple platinum on the social media platforms after British hyperpop artist of the moment Charli XCX grinds Brat summer to a halt with three words: “kamala IS brat.”
The world stops for a second. The record scratches. We do a double-take. We ask why Charli XCX getting involved with this? We ask why is the Harris campaign running with it? The music starts again, the Fire Island Gays™ print t-shirts expeditiously, the memes flow like fresh water from a baby coconut plucked from the content farm, and some people are deluded into thinking this will help Harris win the election.
Oops.
Demure
We’ve reached August, a time when we’ve been instructed to become “very demure, very mindful” and “cutesy” about our workplace appearance by TikTok influencer Jools Lebron. The phrase exploded in every comments section of every post in every corner of social media, in ad campaigns, merch, speaking, and publicity opportunities for Lebron, and other avenues. The best part is that the virality of the video actually helped Lebron fund her transition! Dictionary.com even named “demure” as its 2024 Word of the Year.
Maybe it’s because I work from home too much, or because I’m simply not mindful enough to get it, but I was always puzzled by the way the internet latched onto this particular trend.
Kendrick vs. Drake Beef
An overarching saga of 2024 has to include the beef between rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake, which at a cursory level, I’ve boiled down to two grown men writing poems and fanfiction vexing each other. Drake has always been ripe for picking on in the meme-o-sphere for being cringe, but Lamar dumped kerosene over the fire with the release of “Not Like Us” (2024) in May. The single topped the charts for weeks and won multiple awards, and Drake eventually filed a suit against the record label Universal Music and the streaming service Spotify for allegedly artificially boosting the track with bots, and for defamation for streaming content that “falsely alleges” that he is a sex offender.
Safe to say we know who won here …
Moo Deng (ft. Pesto)
September has rolled around, and that means we’re up to the woman of the hour — Moo Deng, the consistently moisturized Thai baby pygmy hippo whose scampering, biting, pool time, and silent screams captured in their obligatory blurriness, goes triple platinum on all social media platforms. An international sensation by 10 weeks old, the spritely baby was at one point responsible for at least 40% of our collective well-being in the lead-up to the election. Many adored her, some wanted to eat her, and she became ubiquitous through memes, merch, advertisements, and more.
Moo Deng had a brief rival — Pesto, the enormous King penguin chick from Melbourne, Australia, whose fuzzy physique weighed in at more than that of his parents combined within months of his hatching. Pesto eventually shed the baby weight during his transition to adolescence.
She did have a rather abrupt fall from grace, as most women in the spotlight do. A nefarious setup led to Moo Deng (accurately) predicting Trump’s win, and the world turned on her.
True fans will wait until she is ready to enter the public eye again … Good things come to those who wait.
Transgender Surgeries on Illegal Aliens in Prison
September 10, 2024, might have been one of the strangest nights of my life. My roommate and I begrudgingly watch the second Presidential debate with Harris and Trump, and turn to each other after we hear the uttering of “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison,” thinking it was a glitch in the matrix. Stranger things have happened, but nope. The Coconut Tree Stare continues as we get hit with the extremely false rumor that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, the claim that Democrats support “after-birth abortions” (not to be confused with school shootings), and a word-salad story about “Abdul from Afghanistan.”
Eric Adams Indictment
Remember when the whole world united to hate Grimes and Elon Musk’s first baby? Unified in our collective hatred of our incompetent and narcissistic mayor, New York City rejoiced on the day of Eric Adams’s indictment, offering a singular ray of hope in a blustering seastorm of horrible news, funding cuts, and knee-buckling inflation rates. (Sidebar: the horny emoji spam text revival this year, as seen in the image above, is the prime example of general unseriousness I’m referring to.)
I Hate Gay Halloween, What Do You Mean You’re …
It’s late October, and Gay Halloween rams into the atmosphere of the Queer Canon with a slew of DIY costumes referencing a hyper-specific niche side character from a nostalgia-inducing piece of media, or some other such overlooked or momentary presence or concept nested deep within the mind’s eye. We saw outfits inspired by the Passenger Seat from a Chappell Roan song, the POV tennis ball from Challengers (2024), the Brat concert tour curtains, iconic references from the defunct seven-second video app Vine, and so much more to ruminate on in a campy fashion. “What I find interesting is how many of these supposedly forgettable moments resonate with others,” said Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian in our report on the trend. “One of the best parts of contemporary queerness is looking for the glitter in something others have disposed of or devalued.”
Patron Saint Luigi Mangione
I speak confidently when I say that nobody, and I do mean nobody, had this on their 2025 Bingo predictions card. Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has erupted as a revered sexy folk hero across social media as he faces extradition to New York on first-degree murder and terrorism charges after being apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
There is so much to say about this, and yet, I’m speechless — because the public reverence of Mangione sets the tone of 2025 flawlessly.
Anyway, that was a lot, so go lie down, and I’ll see you next year.
