It’s summer! The smells of cookouts and pools are in the air! A very high percentage of humidity is also in the air! The East Coast might be melting! California is on fire! And with these tumultuous times comes another very important summer tradition: Best Of Year (So Far) lists. Yes, it isn’t enough to flood the internet with year-end lists every winter, but we must also churn out year-so-far lists, like this TV Club one and this more broad pop-culture one. Well, the fine people at the Daily Dot have put together a year-so-far list of their own: the best and biggest memes of 2016 (so far). Memes are born at approximately a rate of 1 million per minute, so who knows what this list will look like in December.
For example, do you even remember Exploding Kid? Gosh, it seems like it was a full year ago (which is seven years in Meme Years) when the picture of a teen boy with poppin’ off veins first popped up in the memeosphere. Technically, it first blew up in late December 2015, but there are no hard rules when it comes to meme curation.
There was also Damn, Daniel, the viral video that, most crucially, reignited hype for white Vans in the Year Of Our Pepe 2016. Pharrell killed the meme by using it way too much to promote his The Voice team member Daniel Passino. RIP Damn, Daniel.
Speaking of killing, one of the best election memes to surface this year was the (thus not unproven so therefore technically still valid) theory that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Has anyone been able to prove that Ted Cruz is a human person and not a sentient meme? There’s another solid theory for you to chew on.
In 2016, Michael Jordan cried, Ben Affleck was sad, Dat Boi came and conquered, and Drake performed at a Cheesecake Factory. May the coming months bring more viral insanity.