A Look Back At The Best Memes Of 2021

Where would we be without memes In our increasingly digital lives, memes have become a shorthand for expressing our feelings in a way that feels both relatable and familiar to hundreds if not thousands of strangers online. We can throw down a certain template, put our own spin on it (or share someone else’s), and get that immediate dopamine boost from mutual friends and randos online who either share the same feelings or appreciate our skill at flipping the original concept.

High culture it’s not, but we deserve a little stupid, mindless fun. Especially after a year like 2021.

Even if you’re one of those rare few on this planet who are able to keep their screen time in check, you’ve probably shared a good dozen or two memes amongst your family, friends, or coworkers these past 365 days. Your parents probably even attempted to throw down a meme or two. Badly, but hey, bad parent memes are a meme within themselves! So in celebration of all the meme-idge of 2021, here are the 14 best memes of the year, how they impacted us, and what they say about us (if anything at all).

— ♣️nxthxnie1♣️ (@nxthxnie1) January 22, 2021

Kicking off our list is a meme that’s still making the rounds nearly a year later. When Bernie Sanders rolled up to the Biden Inauguration in a comfort-focused fit, a homely pair of mittens and a basic surgical face mask, all sorts of political pundits and center-left Twitter personalities attempted to roast the senator for exhibiting such a gloomy attitude during Biden’s big day. Flash forward 11 months and it feels downright prophetic. Although we’ve got Trump out of office, things are largely the same — grim. Bernie was ahead of the game, thumbing his nose at the shallow pageantry that comes along with electing a new president. (Or maybe he was just an old dude who didn’t want to freeze.)

The Bernie meme was soon recontextualized into all sorts of weird and wacky scenarios — Bernie at the Met Gala, etc. At the end of the day, it’s just a funny image. One popular enough to inspire cardboard cutouts in storefronts and murals on walls in cities across the country.

— Zack Bornstein (@ZackBornstein) March 4, 2021

You don’t have to be a WandaVision fan to fall in love with this exaggerated wink from Kathryn Hahn in her role as Agnes Harkness. Case in point, me! I have no idea who Agnes Harkness is, I’ve never seen WandaVision, and I don’t plan to but I’ve been known to Kathryn Hahn wink at all manner of things!

The scene this was taken from first appeared in the debut WandaVision trailer and since people first got a glimpse of that wink, they’ve been repurposing it. Most people used the Hahn wink anytime they were openly lying, whether to their friends, their employers, their families, and, most often, themselves.

— Lilly Dancyger (@lillydancyger) March 8, 2021

Oprah is a meme machine. For as long as memes have been a popular form of internet discourse, we’ve been recontextualizing GIFs and photos of Oprah. In March of this year the famous journalist sat down for an exclusive interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. Upon hearing that members of the royal family expressed their concern over the possible complexion of Meghan and Harry’s baby, Oprah threw her hands up in shock and disbelief.

Then the internet took it and used it for any shocking moment we had to deal with this year. The thought of jumping on a call for a conversation that could just as easily be held over email Oprah shock! The possibility of another lockdown or another covid variant Oprah shock. Standing next to an anti-masker while they cough and sneeze in line at Target — Oprah shock! That entire interview was filled with moments ripe for meme-ing.

But nobody ever askz… “How’z Dogecoin doing” pic.twitter.com/ZukEpnHte4

— Matt Wallace (@MattWallace888) December 29, 2021

Earlier this year, a bunch of people on Reddit, Twitter, and Discord came together and decided to bet big on GameStop shorts and it threw the entire stock world for a loop. The play resulted in a lot of real money and it also gave birth to a whole bunch of “stock bros,” people whose entire identities revolve around talking about stocks.

First came GameStop, then AMC, then the rise of the meme coin cryptocurrency, resulting in all sorts of ridiculously named virtual money like DogeCoin, Shiba Inu, CumRocket’s Cummies, Dogelon Mars, MonaCoin, Loser Coin, Pepe Cash, and… really just way too many to name. Are any of your friends who care about cryptocurrency meme coins rich No (except the DodgeCoin millionaire!), but I bet they won’t shut up about NFTs.

Sadly, everyone’s sudden obsession with checking their Robinhood account can be attributed to the fact that a lot of people are struggling financially right now. We all desperately want to believe we can get lucky and flip a few thousand into tens or even hundreds of thousands and be set for the years ahead. It’s certainly possible, but we wouldn’t bank on it.

— Fossil Locator (@FossilLocator) August 12, 2021

This simple framework was used aside a bunch of different stills from cartoons, television shows, and movies that at the end of the day boil down to one singular feeling — despair. It touched on the optimism we all felt for the early months of 2021 when the vaccine was being rolled out and it looked like we were actually going to have a regular summer, and how quickly that all faded away with the Delta variant.

It was a serious situation, but the meme helped us all cope just a little bit. Then came Omicron.

— Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) July 14, 2021

Taken during the Cannes premiere of Wes Anderson’s French Dispatch, this photo was snapped of the film’s director standing alongside cast members Timothée Chalamet, Tilda Swinton, and Bill Murray, and the foursome couldn’t look more like they were part of completely different worlds. Timothée looked like a modern-day Hollywood celeb (so basically, a dude from the ‘90s) Tilda Swinton looked like Bowie during his poppy ’80s era, Bill Murray looked like he toured the country following the Grateful Dead, and Wes Anderson looked…well like you’d expect Wes Anderson to look.

Soon the internet took this photo and used it as a basic template to show the stark differences between anything they felt the need to compare. This is one of those memes that got old painfully fast. In fact, we’re sorry we even brought it up and made you relive it.

— Dan Quintana (@dsquintana) June 30, 2021

People might not be able to agree on whether the Star Wars prequel trilogy is any good, but one thing we can all agree on is that it’s a goldmine for memes. GIFs of Jar Jar being a jackass, anything with Ewan McGregor looking overly emotional, the phrase “I hate sand,” there is a lot of good material fit for memes! This year gave us this gem, a four-panel template from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

The original scene concerned Anakin and Padme’s differing views on the Galactic Republic, then it made its way to Twitter with altered dialogue as a sort of proto version of the Red Flag Emoji meme. Now people use it as a simple four-scene joke where the punchline is always shared by panels two and four. The above example doesn’t follow that simple rule, but it’s a masterful use of the tempalate.

Anakin Skywalker as a character goes through probably pop culture’s greatest heel turn, and as such the meme is usually used in reference to people or ideas we previously thought were good and universally loved but have a darkness lurking beneath them. Like the internet itself.

— ً (@gvge_) September 1, 2021

The title of this meme is a bit deceptive, Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane isn’t actually defending Peter Parker here, she’s talking to her boss Enrique, but context doesn’t matter to the internet. Instead, this scene has been repurposed by anyone looking to defend someone else over something they might otherwise get bullied for. The context it’s now used in is always a bit lighthearted, as such, there isn’t a lot of depth or a deeper meaning here — it’s not a mirror that reflects where we are as a society or anything like that. It’s just a silly meme that people like to have fun with.

Sometimes that’s all we need.