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The Woman Yelling at a Cat meme is a combination of two unrelated images. On the left is a 2011 screenshot from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills showing Taylor Armstrong pointing and crying furiously. On the right is Smudge, a white cat looking unimpressed at a plate of salad — a photo from 2018. Someone combined them in 2019, and the format exploded across social media.

The juxtaposition worked because it captured the rhythm of internet arguments: loud emotional accusation meeting calm indifference. Taylor Armstrong later appeared in memes about herself, and Smudge’s owner set up a Patreon. The meme proved that two random images from different corners of the internet could collide to form the perfect reaction — assembly-line meme creation at its finest.

“This Is Fine” comes from a 2013 webcomic by K.C. Green titled “On Fire.” It shows a dog wearing a bowler hat sitting at a table with a cup of coffee while the room burns around him. In the first panel, he calmly says “This is fine.” By the final panel, his face is melting and he insists, “I’m okay with the events that are currently unfolding.”

The first two panels became a universal meme for denial in the face of disaster. It gets deployed during political crises, failing deployments at work, natural disasters, and any moment when staying calm feels absurd. K.C. Green has said he appreciates the meme’s life of its own but sometimes wishes people used the full comic — because the melting face is the point.

In April 2011, an illustrator named Chris Torres posted a GIF to his personal website: a pixel-art cat with the body of a strawberry Pop-Tart, flying through space leaving a rainbow trail behind it. Days later, a YouTube user combined the GIF with a Japanese Vocaloid song called “Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!” The result became Nyan Cat, and the 3-hour loop on YouTube racked up hundreds of millions of views.

In 2021, Chris Torres sold the original Nyan Cat GIF as an NFT for nearly $600,000. A decade-old meme about a pastry cat became one of the earliest proof points that internet culture had monetary value. Nyan Cat bridged two eras: the era of free viral content and the era of digital ownership.

In February 2013, a group of teenagers in Queensland, Australia uploaded a 30-second video in which one masked person danced alone to an electronic track called “Harlem Shake” by Baauer. At the bass drop, the scene cut to a roomful of people in costumes all spasming wildly. Within days, thousands of Harlem Shake videos flooded YouTube. Offices, classrooms, sports teams, and the Norwegian Army all filmed their own versions.

The meme propelled Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the first song ever to reach the top based on a meme. The Harlem Shake wave burned bright and fast. By April, it was dead. But it proved that a simple format plus a catchy beat plus thirty seconds of chaos could conquer the world overnight.

In July 2012, Korean rapper Psy released “Gangnam Style,” a satirical song about the luxurious Gangnam district of Seoul, accompanied by a music video of him performing an invisible-horse-riding dance. The song was entirely in Korean. Within months, it had become the first video in YouTube history to hit one billion views. By December 2014, it had broken YouTube’s view counter, which used a 32-bit integer.

Gangnam Style proved that the meme economy had become global. You didn’t need to understand the lyrics to do the dance, share the video, or laugh at it. Psy performed at the Oscars, the UN, and with MC Hammer. “Oppa Gangnam Style” became one of the most recognized phrases on earth — in any language.

In 2010, a Japanese kindergarten teacher named Atsuko Sato posted photos of her rescue Shiba Inu, Kabosu, on her personal blog. One photo captured Kabosu sitting on a couch with her eyebrows raised in an expression of polite confusion. Three years later, that single photo — paired with multicolored Comic Sans captions in broken English (“such wow,” “much amaze,” “very dog”) — became the Doge meme.

Kabosu was rescued from a puppy mill as an adult dog. Sato never expected her dog to become a global icon. When Dogecoin launched in 2013, it put Kabosu’s face on a cryptocurrency worth billions. Kabosu passed away peacefully in May 2024 at age 18, having lived long enough to see her image etched into internet and financial history.

Rage Comics were crude MS Paint drawings that emerged from 4chan around 2008, then exploded on Reddit’s r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu board. They featured a cast of stick-figure “rage faces” — FFFFUUUU, Forever Alone, Me Gusta, Troll Face, Y U No Guy — that anyone could copy-paste into four-panel comics about everyday frustrations.

The low barrier was the magic. You didn’t need art skills. You just needed to remix existing faces to tell a story about your coworker eating your lunch or a bad date. At their peak around 2011-2012, millions of people were making rage comics every day. They were the first truly participatory meme format — a DIY comic book where the characters were borrowed and the stories were yours.

Pepe the Frog was born in 2005 in a comic called Boy’s Club by Matt Furie, a gentle San Francisco artist who drew stoner animals living together as roommates. One panel showed Pepe pulling down his pants to pee with the caption “feels good man.” That single image escaped the comic around 2008, landed on 4chan’s /b/ board, and took on a life far beyond anything Furie intended.

By 2015, Pepe had become the most remixed meme on the internet. By 2016, he had been hijacked by online extremists and formally classified as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. Matt Furie, horrified at what his innocent frog had become, fought for years to reclaim Pepe — a battle documented in the 2020 film Feels Good Man.

Wojak — also known as “Feels Guy” — first appeared on the Polish imageboard Vichan around 2010. He was a crude bald figure with an expression of weary sadness, paired with the caption “I know that feel, bro.” He spread to 4chan and became the universal shorthand for empathy in internet culture.

Over the years, Wojak mutated. Doomer Wojak wore a beanie and smoked alone. Bloomer Wojak was optimistic and smiling. NPC Wojak was a gray-skinned drone. The “two-sided Wojak” showed a smug bull on one side and a crying bear on the other — the official emoji of crypto Twitter. Wojak became the meme that could express every emotion humans felt about markets, politics, and existence itself.

The Distracted Boyfriend meme is a single 2015 stock photo by Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem, titled “Disloyal man walking with his girlfriend and looking amazed at another seductive girl.” The image shows exactly what the title says: a man turning his head to stare at a passing woman while his girlfriend looks on in disbelief.

In 2017, someone began labeling the three figures to represent choices and temptations: the girlfriend as “something you should want,” the other woman as “something you actually want,” the boyfriend as yourself. It exploded. The format became one of the most labeled images in internet history — a universal template for expressing betrayal of priorities. Antonio Guillem now gives interviews about accidentally creating a global meme.