We can all agree that 2016 was a terrible year. More and more terrible things kept happening, and we created more and more terrible memes to deal with them.

But from the dirty, swirling waters of this year’s awful memepool, we dredged up a few low-key beauties. In no particular order, here are the most underrated memes of 2016, as decided by me, a meme scholar.

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Loss.jpg

Loss.jpg is the slowest burn meme ever, and its ability to permeate every other goddamn meme makes it indestructible. It began in 2008, when the usually comedic webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del published the following four panels about miscarriage:

Long term fans of the webcomic weren’t impressed with this shift in tone so they started parodying it. Thus, loss.jpg was born.

Loss.jpg memes mock the weird tone of the comic by replicating the four-panel comic as abstractly as possible: the first panel has one man, the second and third have two people talking, and the fourth has one person horizontal, another vertical.

For example, this is loss.jpg:

And this is loss.jpg:

And even this is loss.jpg:

It’s a very dumb meme, but it’s also eight years old. Why did it re-emerge with such gusto this year?

I posit it’s because the power of memes became a meme itself this year. Meme communities began to recognise their cultural power, and began to engage with their memetic power in memetic ways. The process of memeing is one of imitation, abstraction, repetition: reifying an idea. Loss.jpg is that process in its purest and most incomprehensible form. Its greatest asset, and the reason it is so underrated, is its inaccessible minimalism.

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“I Am Forcibly Removed From The Premises”

This meme is truly revolutionary. It’s only about a month old, comes from Tumblr, and is the best way to discuss any event in your life. Its framework is simple: you arrive at the premises, your dick is out, and then you are FORCIBLY REMOVED FROM THE PREMISES.

Here are some examples:

“Forcibly removed” is a great meme because it tells a bare bones story. It is the Ernest Hemingway of memes.

It represents a desire to get back to simpler times of memeing, when we used macro images like Insanity Wolf and Bad Guy Steve which had predetermined phrases to communicate simple ideas.

It is a celebration of 2010 era memes, a nostalgia for simplistic memetic form. But because it is very new and mainly limited to Tumblr, it has been severely underrated, so I challenge you to use it.

Your task is simple – first, you arrive at your social media website of choice.

memes: underrated

punchlines: self-referential

dick: out

YOU ARE FORCIBLY REMOVED FROM SOCIAL MEDIA

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Trolley Memes

Decision theory has always been a raucous branch of philosophy, and this year we glorified its niche allure in the dumbest of memes. This 4chan-derived meme is based upon a hypothetical ethical dilemma, where people’s lives are endangered by an encroaching trolley (aka tram, aka bad Melbourne bus).

Your options are: do nothing, thereby absolve yourself of any blame, but through inaction allow five people to die, or switch the tracks so that the trolley only hits one person, but this time you are culpable for their death.

Sexy stuff.

Accompanied by terrible and mangled diagrams, new trolley problems began emerging:

Bonus points if you realised one of those trolley memes was a loss.jpg.

Changing trolley memes from an ethical dilemma to pure “wholesome” humour acts as a kind of wish fulfilment – in fact, the whole genre of wholesomeness does.

Wholesome memes allow us to transform the often hostile internet landscape into something comforting. It removes the conflict and ethical dilemma from an aggressive space. If 2016 is going to kick us to the ground and make us constantly question our ethical and socio-political positions, then memes should be soft and welcoming to compensate. Trolley memes turn stressful things into fun things, and that is what we all ultimately wanted to do this year.

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Dat Boi

O shit waddup? A meme representative of the gif renaissance, that’s waddup.

Dat Boi himself is not underrated, but his history is. Although his catchphrase was Frankensteined from another meme, Dat Boi’s image first appeared in 2001 as part of Animation Factory’s Essential Collection 3. What is that you ask? It is a collection of 12 CD ROMs full of gifs designed to be used with you internet browser, like “Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator”. 2001 was a simpler time.

As Vox recently explained, Dat Boi represents an older age of gif usage, where gifs were used as a way of decorating your web page (and without standardised web design, your web page looked ugly as sin). Animation Factory made thousands of gifs – they estimate verging on 500,000 – and sold them as packages to users in the 1990s.

But more recently, gifs are used less as home décor and more as emotional responses – reaction images. Dat Boi is a decorative gif being used emotively, and his place in internet history is severely underrated.

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Harambe

Harambe clearly wasn’t an underrated meme (although that son of a gun was a bloody underrated gorilla) but I want to talk about why Harambe has been underrated theoretically.

damn right, Apple.

[tears well up in my eyes]

damn right. pic.twitter.com/chPpjNRjS7

— Colley From Die Hard (@JamColley) July 20, 2016

Brian Feldman at New York Magazine has a pretty good reason for what makes it such an unusual meme: “‘Harambe’ is still a funny punch line because brands will never touch it.” The meme is a molotov cocktail of taboos: animal execution, child violence, death. But we celebrated its memetic power, because it made us realise just how anti-capitalist memes are. Harambe reinforced a sense of active camaraderie amongst the meme community, re-inscribing the celebration of anti-authoritarianism and cultural anarchy of the internet.

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Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer

I’ll come out and say it: Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer has changed the political sphere. Well, the memetic political sphere at least.

For those unaware, Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer aims to spread the rumour that the identity of the elusive Zodiac Killer, who murdered between 5 and 20 people in California in the ’60s, is once-Presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Never mind the fact that Cruz was born in Canada two years after the killings (allegedly).

pic.twitter.com/mivP6wiQHw

— Adam Zopf (@adamzopf) May 4, 2016

There are many things I find fascinating about this meme. First of all, it is not tied to any form. Unlike Dat Boi, it has no imagery or phrase associated with it. It is merely an idea – a meme in its purest form. But secondly, it was the silliest bit of character assassination we have ever seen, and, to an extent, it worked.

The first sign of Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer’s intrusion into the broader political sphere came when a poll indicated that some 38% of Floridian voters thought that Cruz either was or could be the Zodiac Killer. The next emergence of the meme came from Cruz himself; when Jimmy Kimmel asked him what his favourite cereal was, Cruz replied “Cereal, or serial killer?” (Truly, a bad deployment of an otherwise unspoilt meme – I’m sure his interns were mortified.)

Then, Larry Wilmore dedicated two and a half minutes of his White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech to Zodiac Killer jokes.

Two days later, when interviewing Cruz’s wife Heidi, Yahoo News asked her opinion about the jokes.

“Well, I’ve been married to him for 15 years, and I know pretty well who he is, so it doesn’t bother me at all. There’s a lot of garbage out there,” she answered. In the words of Vanity Fair, this is, of course, exactly what the wife of the Zodiac killer would say.

Cruz dropped out of the race later that same day. Combined with (false) Trump-originated rumours that Cruz’s father was involved with JFK’s assassination, as well as his general creepiness and bad polling in non-evangelical demographics, Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer dragged Cruz to a murky political death.

Zodiac Killer was an underrated meme because the internet didn’t appreciate its genuine impact upon American political culture.

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Melania Trump “Hello?” Meme

I… can’t even explain this meme. Apart from a few Tumblr skirmishes, no one knows about it and it easily deserves as much airtime as Biden Obama memes.

Is it a copypasta? Is it remix videos? Who knows. It’s a confusing, wonderful mess, and it’s easily the most underrated meme of 2016.

“He’s strong. He’s tough. He’s passionate. He’s a good leader. He’s telling the truth. He’s telling the truth.”

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Emma Balfour is a graduate of Sydney University who wrote her Honours thesis on memes in the 2016 US Presidential Election, which you can read in full here. She tweets about memes and American politics and dogs @balfies.

You can catch Emma at The Harambe Memorial Service this Saturday, part of the Sydney Opera House’s Bingefest.