Memes tend to be serious business around here, figure out what that means

Depending on who you are and how old you are, your first experience with memes may vary greatly. For myself, and I’m sure many others the first real internet memes were demotivational posters. Typically these consist of an image macro, centered in a border of black with an all-cap title written in white, and in some cases, a tagline written in smaller font. If you have some time and are feeling nostalgic, I highly recommend taking a trip down memory road to a simpler time on the internet.

Sometimes they had demotivational text, sometimes it was just absurd; but the absurdity didn’t end there - in a brief time they evolved to include multiple titles, each in response to the last. Others of you may remember rage comics, advice animals, scumbag Steve, or even Kermit the Frog sipping tea.

Regardless of how you were first introduced to memes, I’m sure there was a moment of discomfort as you tried to make sense of how to pronounce this new word from the internet: “May-May”, “Mi-Mi”, “Meh-Mah”. We were all trying our best to navigate bringing this online word offline and struggling (some of us still are today).

However, the history of memes dates back long before what most of us conceptualize as memes. In fact, the word ‘meme’ was first coined by Richard Dawkins back in 1976 and even then he was acknowledging that this was a concept that others had touched on before him. So if the term meme refers to more than just image macros (and maps!) online, what does it mean? And what did memes look like prior to the internet?

The dictionary defines memes as “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.” Or to put it plainly, memes are sharing an idea within a culture.

Now that we know what memes are, what did pre-internet memes look like? Commonly pre-internet memes were able to be replicated by stencil, by fax/photocopying, or by virtue of being so simple that anyone could create/recreate the image. One of the most popular pre-internet memes was just that. The ‘Kilroy was Here’ meme is a simple drawing that consists of a cheerky little fellow peaking over a ledge, with his fingers and nose draped over. Simple, yet iconic, and at it’s peak was as popular as many internet meme is today.

Did you find this interesting and want to know more about the history of memes? Drop a comment below to let us know you want more meme history content.