Funny Memes: What are They and Why are They Popular?

Posted: March 9, 2023 | Last updated: April 13, 2023

If you’ve spent much time scrolling through your social media accounts, you may already have come across funny memes. Funny memes, or memes in general, are now popular and influential. While funny memes are meant to express a particular feeling through humor, you can leverage them to promote your business or brand.

Funny Memes

The rise in the popularity of memes on the internet dates back to the early 2000s. The use of funny memes has come a long way since they first came out on the internet, and they’re so rampant that it’s almost impossible not to come across at least one meme in a day. Funny memes are fun to view and most of them are relatable. But who would’ve thought that memes can benefit brands? Many of the funny memes 2022 brought us featured alcoholic beverage brands – memes can provide that added boost your brand needs.  

If you want to find out what funny memes are and how you can use them to your brand’s advantage, then stick to the end of this article.

What is a Meme?

If you don’t already know, memes or funny memes are now considered a medium for expressing a culturally-relevant notion or idea. It is a piece of media that is shared across the internet with the intention of eliciting particular emotions, mostly humor. Memes are often come as viral short videos and in captioned images format. At first glance, a meme may seem to be for humor purposes only, but if you look closely, funny memes are a way to connect people and to share inside cultural jokes with others.

Memes can be created by editing pre-existing media, like an image or a viral video clip, or by using a personal video, photo, or illustration. One of the most common edits of funny memes is image macros or images that contain texts superimposed over them. The text varies according to the context or an “inside joke,” but it is often a play of words or a witty pun. Not all memes are edited as image macros, and not all image macros are memes. 

While hilarious memes became internet famous in the 2000s, the word’s origin can be traced back to the 1970s when Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, coined it in his book The Selfish Gene. If you want to dig deeper into this word’s origin, you may look it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

What Meme is the Most Popular?

The internet is filled with various memes and thousands of them are created daily, but a few ones stand out. In no particular order, here are some of the most popular funny memes in the history of internet memes (you may already be familiar with most of these):

Woman Yelling at A Cat

One of the most notorious memes in 2019 is this combined image of a woman yelling and a confused white cat. The upset woman on the left is a screencap taken from an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, while the right image obviously shows a cat with a seemingly confused facial expression.

The whole idea or theme of this meme is that the woman wants to insist on what is right, while the cat nonchalantly settles for the humor. This combined photos turned meme format came to life in May of 2019 and officially became an object-labeling meme in June of the same month. The irony in funny cat memes almost always gets us every time.  

Evil Kermit

Kermit the Frog is a legendary icon that has now become a modern meme icon. This meme format is based on a screencap from Muppets Most Wanted where Kermit is to face Constantine his arch enemy.

This meme is often used to inject humor in those life moments when our inner demons come out to face and tempt us – a funny meme  that also reminds us of our dark side!

Hide the Pain Harold

Hide the Pain Harold meme involves a senior man stock photography model whose facial expression seems to convey a suppressed feeling of pain or discomfort. And the meme is used to humorously express a suppressed emotion.

Believe us, Harold, we know how you feel!

Ight Imma Head Out

We all know Spongebob and what he does for a living, but what we didn’t see coming is his becoming a meme character. This reaction meme allows you to express your desire to exit a particular situation or scenario.

So, if you want to throw shade on a certain event or situation, you’ll find this meme handy.

Condescending Wonka

The Condescending Wonka image macro meme format features a screencap of the 1971 Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory musical. As the meme’s name suggests, this can be captioned with sarcastic, condescending, or patronizing text.

How to use a Meme?

There are multiple ways to use a meme; you can use it to throw shade and express your emotions, among others. However, from the point of view of a brand, business, or marketer, the best way is to utilize a meme to engage with their target market or audience. Marketing through memes is a great strategy, particularly if a huge fraction of your avid audience is millennials and/or Gen-Zers. Furthermore, similar to every marketing effort, brands who want to use funny memes on social media must primarily have a clear marketing strategy to use as a blueprint as they hop on the trend.

Based on statistics, most internet users spend at least 100 minutes of their day on social media and most of today’s conversations on social media platforms are tainted with references and jokes made online. Hence, it can be an advantage for you to translate this into your brand’s advertising and marketing strategies through the use of funny memes.

What are Useful Tips On Using funny Memes for Marketing?

Using funny memes for your marketing efforts still requires thorough planning and a proper strategy; you can’t just throw a couple of random memes into the basket and expect it to be a hundred percent effective. If you want to incorporate memes into your social media marketing and digital marketing efforts, you better take notes of these helpful tips:

Showcase your brand’s personality.

When creating a meme for your brand, it’s crucial that you take into consideration your brand’s overall personality. The best way of creating meme content that your audience will love is to reflect your brand’s personality and interests. Funny memes can increase engagement and connection with your audience as well as add color to your content if done the right way. Your audience follows your brand because of its personality, so the best meme to create is one that still stays on brand. Making your memes funny in a way that emphasizes your brand’s known attributes can do wonders for your brand. 

Consider your audience.

Funny memes, no matter how humorous, aren’t funny to some people and that’s a fact you should consider when trying to come up with your meme marketing strategies. If your target audience and avid followers are younger and more modern, you may use edgy and irreverent memes. But if your audience is composed of older and more conservative people, you can save your brand from shame by steering clear of anything that’s considered offensive and rude. The point is to poke fun with your memes, but not forget to consider your market because they’re a huge part of what keeps your brand afloat.

Stay on top of the trend.

To choose or create a meme with high appeal to the masses, you must first identify which meme is trending. You can check current events and pop culture to discover funny memes circulating on the internet. If you can tap into an already popular meme, you will more likely be successful in getting the attention of your audience as well as the potential audience who will come across your meme.

Another important factor to consider if you want to stay trending is relatability. A meme stays trending if people find it relatable and relevant, so if you want to successfully connect with your audience through your memes, make sure to make your memes as relatable as possible.

Keep it concise.

A short, but witty message on the meme can be more humorous than putting in a bunch of long texts. Longer texts create dull moments and may get lost in the reader’s train of thought; hence concise and on-point memes work better in making your readers LOL. You must also put utmost consideration on your reader’s time, some of them are multitasking while reading your meme, so you’d want them to be able to quickly read the text. Worst of all, readers might just scroll past your meme if they find it too long to read, and you don’t want to risk that!

Maximize social media exposure.

In other words, share your meme! You will want to share your funny memes across different social media platforms and websites for maximum engagement, reach, and brand exposure. If your brand manages an account for every popular social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok, make sure to post your memes there and strive to make them viral. If your social media accounts have a large following, your meme will be seen instantly by many people. Don’t fret if you only have a meager following count because your followers, if they find your memes amusing, will share it with their friends or tag others on your post, so you can still increase your reach.

You can also give meme websites, such as KnowYourMeme, a shot. If they find your meme interesting, you might get featured and get more exposure.

How Do I Find Trending Memes?

Sourcing for trending memes isn’t so hard today. Sometimes, you just have to browse through your Facebook home page and find various trending memes being shared and re-shared by your friends. If your friends aren’t fond of funny memes, you can visit several websites that serve hot and fresh memes. Here are some of the best websites you can visit to find viral memes:

9gag

Before Facebook came into the limelight, 9Gag was built so people could share funny content online without fear of being judged. 9Gag users accept whatever meme is served on their plate, and don’t find offense in these humorous images and video clips. The website categorizes different memes based on their types.

The users may upvote memes they love, so it goes on to be popular and be shown on top of the lists. Users can also engage with other users in the comment section and discuss the most entertaining meme.

Reddit

Reddit is primarily a forum website with active communities; it isn’t a meme-exclusive website, unlike 9gag. Over time, Reddit’s meme community experienced immense growth and has over 430 million active users contributing and engaging with this community. Most of the memes on Reddit are relatable and light.

Know Your Meme

Aside from having a wide collection of the best memes on the internet, Know Your Meme shares with its users the history and origin of a particular meme. If you experience trouble looking for a particular meme, this website can surely help you out. The website has a mixed collection of viral memes, as well as memes that have less visibility on huge platforms.

Caution: the website’s user interface is so old school and may trigger nostalgia.

Funny Memes are for meme marketing

Despite other people’s nasty opinions about memes, funny memes are useful if you’ve gone through a rough day and just want a good laugh. Best of all, memes can be maximized by brands and marketers to widen their reach, increase engagement, and heighten brand awareness. So, we beg to disagree when others say that memes are immature and a waste of time. Meme marketing has proven to be effective and a lot of big brands implemented this strategy in their marketing efforts.

If you want to cross-post your memes and other content across multiple social media channels, you can easily do so by using a social media management tool. Check out this Social Flow review and Sked Social review for more info.