The Meme Museum

In December 2004, Gary Brolsma filmed himself lip-syncing and dancing enthusiastically to the Romanian pop song 'Dragostea Din Tei' by O-Zone while sitting at his computer. Posted to Newgrounds, it became one of the first webcam videos to go massively viral before YouTube even existed. Brolsma reportedly became embarrassed by the attention and briefly went into hiding before embracing his internet fame.

From a 2016 Peruvian video of men dancing while carrying a coffin, paired with Tony Vlachos' 'Astronomical' music. The meme 'Here to Shot' became viral in 2020 on TikTok, used to show someone about to fail or experience a terrible outcome. It became one of the most recognizable TikTok memes of the pandemic era.

A viral video meme based on footage shot at Berlin's Fuckparade in July 2000 and uploaded to the internet in 2001. The clip shows a muscular man dancing forcefully after confronting another participant, and it became widely known after being reuploaded to YouTube in 2006 and going viral in 2007. The character became one of the best-known early viral video figures of the web era.

An image macro series that began with a Geocities page in October 2002. It used a still of Jeff Goldblum from The Fly and was originally meant as a bathroom-stall joke, with the idea that the celebrity was 'watching you poop.' It helped establish an early meme template built around the snowclone format 'X is watching you Y.'

LOLcats are images of cats with intentionally misspelled captions written in a broken English dialect known as 'lolspeak'. The format began on 4chan's imageboards around 2006 and exploded into mainstream culture in 2007 with the launch of icanhascheezburger.com. The site generated millions of daily visitors and spawned an entire genre of animal image macros.

Based on a 2010 photo of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu dog owned by Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato. The dog's skeptical sideways glance became the subject of image macros using Comic Sans text and intentionally broken English phrases like 'much wow', 'very dog', 'so amaze'. It exploded on Reddit and Tumblr in 2013. The Doge image later became the face of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, which at its peak had a market cap of over $80 billion.

Tardar Sauce, nicknamed Grumpy Cat, was a female mixed-breed cat whose permanently grumpy expression was caused by feline dwarfism and an underbite. Her photo was posted to Reddit in September 2012 by her owner Bryan Bundesen. She became one of the most famous internet animals of all time, inspiring a movie, merchandise, and a lawsuit her owner won for $710,000. Tardar Sauce passed away in May 2019.

Released by South Korean musician PSY in July 2012, Gangnam Style became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views, then two billion, then three billion. The horse-riding dance move spawned countless parodies and covers worldwide. It was so popular that YouTube's view counter was not designed to handle numbers above 2,147,483,647 and required an emergency update to accommodate PSY's view count.

From the 2001 film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, where Boromir (played by Sean Bean) says 'One does not simply walk into Mordor.' The still image became an image macro template around 2011-2012 on Reddit and 9GAG, used to describe any deceptively difficult task. It remains one of the most durable meme formats, still used widely today.