Here Are the Dankest Memes of 2017

Memes are basically a substitute for actual thought—that's exactly why they're so useful as political propaganda. But the fact that they're a sort of shorthand also makes them nearly impossible to explain. What makes something like Salt Bae funny? How do you break down what's happening in Distracted Boyfriend? Could you explain to your grandma what it means to "crack a cold one open with the boys" if you had a gun pressed against your head? You probably couldn't, but the fact that they almost defy dissection means that they're as helpful for forgetting the horrifying reality of 2017 as they are for recruiting neo-Nazis.

Even meme historians struggle when asked to put the appeal of the medium into words, as well as with other basic questions we were forced to confront when putting together this list. For instance: What makes a meme a meme? Is BBC Dad one, or is it just a viral video? What's the difference? But even if you put classification issues aside, trying to figure out which memes are qualitatively "the best" is a nightmare. Lists always make people mad, anyway. So we're just gonna go for it anyway. —Allie Conti, Senior Staff Writer

For the uninitiated, the expanding brain meme is "an image macro that uses New Age depictions of what happens inside your skull to show the difference between sheeple and the truly enlightened—from ordinary brain to universe-enfolding Vitruvian Man," as Select All's Brian Feldman explained earlier this year. But this meme is not merely humorous internet fodder—it is a way of life.

If you live a small-brained life, something I know little about, your pop cultural and political perspectives tend to fall in line with the majority of society. Maybe you hate the movie Suicide Squad. Or perhaps you think John Oliver calling Trump "Drumpf" is a magnificent own. But if you've ascended to galactic bliss, you begin to see the world differently, because you understand that when something is bad, it is actually very good. You learn to find pleasure in the abject. It's almost a post-logic way of understanding the world.

Earlier this year, in a piece I wrote for Noisey about my twisted love of MSNBC host Joe Scarborough's music, which most music experts would agree is "bad," I explained how my galactic brained lifestyle—basically having irony poisoning—led me to feel only affection for music that sounds engineered for maximal enjoyment: "I spend around six hours a day shitposting on Twitter, and I can no longer differentiate between my alt, who loves everything you hate, the queen of trash who has been known to do things like put $100 worth of Suicide Squad merch on my credit card, and me, Eve Peyser, real woman and politics writer at VICE, who sees what's really going on." In short,

Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter.

Men love to beg for credit and validation when they do the most basic shit imaginable. Recognition of this universal truth is why people loved to dunk on a guy inexplicably named "Tripp," who posted a self-congratulatory Instagram post in which he… asked for an award because he loved his wife? The fact that BuzzFeed breathlessly wrote it up as a "win" just fanned the flames further. People can pair the copy of Tripp's original post with almost any picture, and I'll laugh.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Slobodan Praljak was a Bosnian Croat general during the wars that tore apart what used to be Yugoslavia in the 90s. Many horrible things happened during those conflicts, and Praljak was one of a half-dozen Bosnian Croat leaders whose convictions for war crimes were upheld by the Hague this November. As soon as the court decided this, he declared “Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal,” chugged a tiny bottle of poison, died, and became an immortal meme.

Shorn of context, the still of him drinking poison—eyes open, head thrown back—is honestly pretty funny. He’s a craggy old man who looks like if Ron Perlman had been through a chemical attack; his expression is unreadable, but it seems to say, Fuck this. In real life, Praljak is a controversial figure still regarded as a hero by many in his homeland; online he’s an amusingly over-the-top reaction meme. (I’ve personally used the poison-drinking meme in reaction to news that Ed Sheeran is making an album inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and rumors that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio might run for president in 2020.)

This year was one where a lot of ugly, shocking things happened and a lot of people are feeling more beaten down than usual—a joke about killing yourself seems like a reasonable response to the bleakness of 2017, but also maybe a sign that the way we communicate online has less and less to do with reality.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Late January 2017 was a dark time. I was in deep denial that Obama had actually relinquished the White House to Donald Trump, and the flurry of deranged executive orders signed by DJT in the early days of his presidency was like #saltbae-ing the wound (forgive me). The silver lining to this erosion of democracy? All those Trump’s First Order of Business memes. Sure, Trump pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and instituted a ban on Muslims, but at least we have GIFs of the president showing off crude drawings and messing up that S-symbol everyone used to draw. That makes everything OK, right? Right?!

Follow Kara Weisenstein on Twitter.

Rick and Morty was one of the noisiest shows of the year, from an explosive April Fool's Day premiere to viral reports of trolls harassing the show's female staff and police quelling an angry crowd during a botched McDonald's promotion. For some people, the loud fans completely ruined the show.

Enter one of my favorite memes of the year: a copypasta instantly recognizable by its opening line, "To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty." This post caught on because it fulfilled a vital service for people trying to enjoy Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland's off-kilter sci-fi sitcom, which shattered Adult Swim's ratings records. The meme effectively shut down the toxic element of the fandom by using fans' smugness against them. As a tool, it was eventually overused to the point that it became toxic itself, but by then the message was clear: Don't be like this guy. Not all memes need a purpose, but I'm grateful to this one for how it helped embody—and reject—the flaws in one of my favorite online communities.

Follow Beckett Mufson on Twitter.

Much like 2017, this meme is pretty shitty and doesn't make a lot of sense. The original image shows your illnesses sending you iMessages for some reason, but the meme version replaces the third serious message with some bizarre BS like a message from a cow or "Come to Brazil!" In times when I am in surreal state of being constantly logged on with no end in sight, this is the absurd content I need.

Follow Peter Slattery on Twitter.

It only gets better the closer you look—making it a good meme—and gets funnier once we enter the Photoshop Battle—making it a great meme. Sauron memes, NWO memes, Putin memes. Much crossover. Much meta. Many laughs. But it’s on the third point that this meme really shines.

Left to right we’re looking at Egyptian president (and ex-general) Abdel Fattah el Sisi, King Salman of Saudi Arabia and, of course, former host of The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, Donald J. Trump. Besides the fact that two of these three men are likely suffering from dementia, while the other seized power in a literal military coup, there are several elements here that make it totally weird to laugh at: The photo was taken at the "Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology in Saudi Arabia," on the same trip that Trump finalized a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis. Saudi Arabia is currently very much involved in killing large numbers of civilians in its intervention into the civil war in Yemen. It is also very busy repressing its own population using military force. So we’re essentially laughing at some guys celebrating their success at crushing opposition in the years to come. lol!

But back to that dementia thing and its wider context. If we zoom out a bit on the photo, we can see that the entire room is filled with a bunch of old dudes. These are the dudes running the show (I counted two women in total). These are the “they” Noam Chomsky keeps yelling about. Are they busy solving the world’s many problems? Perhaps addressing our ongoing dependence on fossil fuels and the apocalyptic consequences to come? “Hahaha, no, we’re old and rich, and we’d much rather play out childhood fantasies of world domination and just palm this awesome glowing orb like a couple of Dr. Fucking Evils.” This is how the world ends.

Follow Michael Bolen on Twitter.

Salt Bae was the first great meme of 2017. It came out on January 7, at a time when the country was still in shock and unsure of what was to come. It felt like everything was on fire, the nation impossibly divided, and then here we were, all coming together and agreeing that the way the hot guy salts the thing is funny and stylish and also sexy. Look at us, laughing together again, we thought. It is a ridiculous way to salt a meal, creasing the arm upward and sprinkling it out in pebbles across the forearm and down onto the meat. Emerson just said in Slack the reason for this is to “distribute the salt flakes more evenly over a wider area,” which I get, but also seems kind of insane. I think the hot guy knows he looks extra hot when he sprinkles salt like that because it shows off his muscles.

Follow Jonathan Smith on Twitter.

The basic idea is that teens are using apps to create and post hyper-specific content and relating their individual experiences to each other through these pictographic journal entries in the process. But with the combined aesthetic of every retail chain that still has enough money for a brick and mortar, a meme format that knows no structural limits, and the compositional sense of a teen's bedroom come Sunday night, it's often impossible to tell whether they were made by humans or algorithms. Niche memes have destroyed my ability to tell whether something is an ad or not. Which make them great memes. And potentially even better ads. Hi bich, it's the future—and everything is for sale.

Emerson Rosenthal is not on Twitter.