Memes, memes, memes. Imagine how dull life would be without any memes! Whether it’s boring, grey, and rainy outside, or the sun’s out in all its glory, we feel like there’s never a wrong moment to enjoy some of the top memes of all time. Comedy is what picks us up when we’re down, chases away the blues, and helps us plow our way through the week toward that magical land called the weekend.

Some of the funniest memes of all time get shared on the aptly named ‘Meme’ social media project. A veritable comedy leviathan on Instagram and Twitter. This page gives us precisely what many of us need: a laugh, a smile, and an excuse to forward the best memes ever to our friends.

Who Invented Memes and Why?

Richard Dawkins coined the word ‘meme’ in 1976 in his book ‘The Selfish Gene.’ He used it to explain how aspects of culture replicate, mutate, and evolve. The earliest example of an Internet meme was emoticons. The smiley emoticon was introduced by Scott Fahlman in 1982.

Dawkins stated that Internet memes lead to a “hijacking of the original idea.” One of the first memes to go viral was the ‘Dancing Baby,’ a simple computer animation made by Michael Girard, Robert Lurye, and John Chadwick. It was one for the history books.

All that leads us to where we are today with the greatest memes of all time! We’ve collected some of the project’s most hilarious memes to share with you, Pandas. So scroll down, be sure to upvote the pics you enjoyed the most, and don’t forget to drop your wittiest comments, too!

I will go thru all my streaming apps and just choose things I want to see, add them to my watch list. Could do this for an hour or more. The finding of great programs is more exciting then the programs themselves. Help me.

What Makes Up Great Memes?

Content creator, comedian, and broadcaster Trev Lewis was kind enough to share his thoughts on memes, comedy, and relatability with Bored Panda. “The two most common types of content that go viral are animals and food. This is what the data shows. No matter how many times algorithms get tweaked, or which platform we’re discussing, people remain fixated on nourishment and other creatures. We are quite animalistic in that way,” he explained to us.

That’s why pretty much anything relating to doggos, Grumpy cat, birbs, and other wacky animals became peak internet fodder. If you want to put his theory to the test, why don’t you check out these hilarious animal memes? If that doesn’t fill your belly, try these spot-on food memes.

He also stated that humor isn’t necessary for viral content, but it helps. “Relatability is a more crucial component because this is the factor that often inspires people to share the content with others. Sharing is the highest form of engagement and the one true path to viral content. All the other forms of engagement will follow it,” he told Bored Panda. That’s precisely why awesome internet memes can make people have a good laugh and inspire them to share it ahead.

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According to content creator Trev, our sense of humor online grows more sophisticated with time. That means even the best memes and their creators must constantly adapt to the times.

“When I’m curating content for The Best and Worst Of Twitter group, I will often search for viral Tweets from the earliest days of the platform. Some of that content still holds up, but much of it does not,” Trev said.

What Is the Most Popular Animal in Memes?

“The earliest memes were things like the ‘I Can Haz Cheeseburger’ cat. Cats have remained a constant, proving my earlier point a bit. They are the Internet’s favorite animal, and it’s not even close. But the simple act of editing some text onto an image of a cat has lost its novelty.” Just like Trev stated, cat memes have evolved a lot since the early days of the Internet and have provided us with some of the most popular memes of all time.

Trev put it simply: amusing folks these days takes far more effort. “I suspect we will only get more creative as time marches on. There’s also an interesting theory that humor is primarily a coping mechanism or even a trauma response,” he said. That’s also why some people tend to prefer weird and unhinged memes. Regardless of people’s tastes, we can all agree that some of the best funny memes are universal, like the Internet’s favorite ‘Rick Roll.’

Let’s face it: we have all cringed when hearing the lines:

‘Never gonna give you up,

Never gonna let you down,

Never gonna run around and desert you.’

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