The Best Memes of 2023 (So Far)

Farewell, 2022. Your memes are now consigned to the great digital dustbin in the cloud. Goodbye, the Liz Truss lettuce. Laters, the cat who invaded Vinicius Jr’s World Cup press conference and then got yeeted off the table. Sayonara, anything about The Queue.

It’s 2023, and the market has changed completely. Memes futures trading is very, very hot and there are a few areas where far-sighted investors will likely find healthy returns this year.

Make sure you’ve got some stock tied up in King Charles’ coronation on 6 May – that’s one of the safest investments anyone’s likely to make this year. Enforced solemnity plus hundreds of world leaders to the power of an old man going through an incredibly mysterious and arcane ritual? That’s meme paydirt.

And in another reflection of 2022 coming up this year, the Women’s World Cup kicks off in July. Major tournaments always come with a side-order of good memes.

After a year of manic political chicanery in the UK there’s little chance of things being quite so mad again, but if Rishi Sunak’s poll numbers stay underwater as the year wears on there’s a genuine threat that the Tory party’s king-across-the-water Boris Johnson could ditch that plough in his Uxbridge constituency he went back to in July and have another go as Prime Minister.

A few old favourites will continue to pay dividends. Elon Musk will continue to be the man who spent the most money of any human being who ever lived just to find out that a lot of people think he’s a wanker. We’ll see how that one plays out.

But while we wait for the first few waves of mad nonsense of the year to break, let’s also enjoy the best of 2022’s funny stuff one more time. It’s just like being at a Peter Kay gig, but you can actually see this before the end of 2025. D’you remember Wordle? Eh? Wordle?? What were all tharrabout??

Boris Johnson faces the music

And so, finally, three years after the start of the pandemic and 18 months after the first reports of leaving dos, booze-ups and ABBA-assisted shindigs celebrating Dominic Cummings’ resignation, Boris Johnson was hauled in front of MPs to answer to accusations of misleading the House of Commons.

The three-hour session at the privileges committee was the first time that he’d been forced to undergo a proper examination with proper consequences. If the committee finds that his statement to the House – that no lockdown rules had been broken in 10 Downing Street despite a run of what looked suspiciously like parties – was said while knowing it wasn’t true, he could be suspended from Parliament. A suspension of 10 or more days means his Uxbridge constituents could call for him to face a by-election, which could see him lose his seat. High stakes stuff, even if there’s more ‘coulds’ in there than you’d expect in a political thriller.

Twitter

So naturally it was appointment to view stuff, with Johnson occasionally taking advice from his £5,000 an hour lawyer Lord Pannick. Pannick, who’s also working with Manchester City on their case with the Premier League where they’re accused of breaking financial rules, was semi-regularly spotted looking slightly less than satisfied with something. Perhaps it was the questions being fired at his client. Perhaps it was the fact Johnson got a right hump on at one point and started having a pop at the committee. Either way, the eyebrows were very lively.

We await the committee’s report, but it didn’t feel like Johnson had managed to talk anyone round to his way of thinking.

At the very least, there are about three more stages at which the memes will cascade. Say what you like about Johnson, the man knows how to generate content.

Gary Lineker vs the actual government

Now that some time has passed, it’s hard to fathom quite how thoroughly the Gary Lineker story shoved absolutely everything else off the news agenda. At one point the Telegraph had eight different comment pieces about it running simultaneously.

On Twitter Lineker criticised it as an “immeasurably cruel policy” which was being used against “the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”. Suella Braverman said that was “irresponsible”. In short order, Lineker was forcibly stood down from Match of the Day duties by high-ups in the BBC.

This did not, it’s fair to say, go down the way that the BBC high-ups intended it to.

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First to support Lineker was known mensch and all round good guy Ian Wright. “Everybody knows what Match of the Day means to me, but I’ve told the BBC I won’t be doing it tomorrow,” he tweeted. “Solidarity.” Alan Shearer joined him at the barricades shortly afterwards. Then Alex Scott pulled out of Football Focus, the commentators said they wouldn’t work on Match of the Day, and the presenters of the BBC’s goals service Final Score followed suit. It all looked quite desperate for the Beeb, and deeply impressive for its unofficial football production union.

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What started as a dispute over a tweet by one of its biggest stars turned into an existential crisis for the BBC, with all and sundry chiming in over the hypocrisy of the corporations dealings with Lineker – Lord Sugar tweeted quite a lot of stuff about hating Jeremy Corbyn, for instance – and the fact that the Richard Sharp, the BBC chairman, donated £400,000 to the Conservatives and still stands accused of helping Boris Johnson sort out a loan while he was Prime Minister. It all smells slightly funny.

So in the end there was no football coverage on BBC TV that Saturday. Come 10.30pm, we got not Match of the Day, but an unbranded value-pack knock-off version called ‘Premier League highlights’. It showed the highlights, but with just crowd noise and no analysis. It was rubbish.

Nonetheless lots of Tories turned up to insist that actually – actually! Funnily enough! – preferred this weird state of affairs. Scott Benton, MP for Blackpool South, said that it was the best edition “in years” as in a break with six decades of precedent it “had all the goals in”. He also claimed it “finished quicker than usual so I could make the pub for last orders,” which, if true, sounds like a cry for help.

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By the middle of the following week, Lineker had been given an apology and was back on usual duties. What an absolute palaver.

The big red boots

It’s been a little while since a look cut through the culture quite so quickly as MSCHF’s Astro Boy-inspired big red boots. The brand does like to use New York Fashion Week to make a statement with footwear – in the past they’ve done Birkenstocks made of recycled Hermés bags and a pair of boots which look like those giant plastic casts footballers wear when their metatarsal’s gone – but none had the impact of the big red boots.

But why? Well, the proportions are perfect. Big enough to look completely absurd but just about small enough to actually walk around in, they’re yours for just $350.

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A press release offered some more intel. “Cartoonishness is an abstraction that frees us from the constraints of reality,” it said. “If you kick someone in these boots, they go boing!”

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They were a massive pain in the arse to actually get off your feet once they were in, but it’s a small price to pay to be king for the eight days or so that everyone was obsessed with them.

Angela Bassett did the thing

Now, we all love the Baftas. They’re a great and glorious thing. They can, however, be a little bit dry at times. This year was something of an exception.

Arianna DeBose of Hamilton, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and Westworld, followed Richard E Grant’s opening monologue with a medley of Eurythmics’ ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’ and Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’ which climaxed with a self-composed rap which recalled that bit in ‘Vogue’ where Madonna gives thanks for Grace Kelly and Jean Harlow and that: “Angela Bassett did the thing, Viola Davis my Woman King / Blanchett, Cate, you’re a genius, and Jamie Lee, you are all of us!”

The whole thing was baffling, but it was that first line – “Angela Bassett did the thing” – and the shoulder-shimmy that accompanied it, which really went big. The whole thing got a bit of a kicking.

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“I think it’s incredibly unfair, to be frank,” Bafta producer Nick Bullen told Variety of the backlash to DeBose’s performance. “I absolutely loved it. Everybody I’ve spoken to who was in the room absolutely loved it.”

“She only had a few weeks to put this whole thing together. She worked with a great musical director and choreographer. So it was a real team effort. She had an amazing team around her, and she and her team put the whole piece together.”

But then the bafflement turned into full-blooded veneration of a moment of high camp which generally gets purged from big pop cultural ceremonies in the UK. Lizzo and Adele shouted it out onstage. It even started getting played in clubs.

And it all came full circle at the NAACP Image Awards, where Bassett did indeed do the thing by winning entertainer of the year.

Bassett DM’d DeBose to check she was OK (she was) and Jamie Lee Curtis came out swinging on DeBose’s behalf too: “For me it was joyous, celebratory, sisterly, hot, spicy, and she’s just so incredibly talented.” A happy ending all round.

Man City v the Premier League

In perhaps the biggest news to hit English football since the vanishing spray finally did for encroaching at free kicks, the Premier League has alleged that Manchester City broke its competition rules on 101 occasions in the 13 seasons from 2009/10.

The four-year investigation has suggested that City failed to, among other things, give “a true and fair view of the club’s financial position” and didn’t “include full details” of how it remunerated staff. The club denies any wrongdoing.

But deny as it may, it can’t stop fans from other clubs rubbing their thighs with glee at the idea of the champions being busted down a division, and being made to hand back any pots won during the disputed period, and possibly also forced to have their Etihad sponsorship taken off their shirts and replaced by a sign reading “I AM A BIG STUPID BABY”.

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Harry’s big book bonanza

The first big to-do of 2023 was the release of Spare, the autobiography of the royal FKA Prince Harry. There were lots of bits which caught the eye, but if you wanted the full experience you really needed to invest in the audiobook version.

Quite a lot of knob chat in there. The word ‘todger’ is simultaneously the only word you’d expect a man of Harry’s station to use for his penis, and also the worst one he could possible have chosen. Todger. Me todger. This ol’ todger o’ mine. Young todge.

Anyway. Lots of fun was had with the bits in between the bits where he was excoriating the Royal Family for all sorts of alleged misdeeds, bad vibes and straight-up horribleness. Spare is not the kind of book you can just walk straight back into the family Christmas do from. It is a hand grenade lobbed into a kennels full of corgis. But then, we’ve all felt like doing something similar at one job or another.

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And the best of 2022

The World Cup at large

Ah man, the World Cup. The best thing that there is, and probably the best one there’s been in a good few decades, and it’s in Qatar and loads of people died because of it. The sport has been brilliant. The spectacle has not been.

And regardless of either of those facts, the memes showered forth. Let’s not forget that there was a time when, thanks to the ball staying in by literally two millimetres, it looked like Japan and Costa Rica were heading through to the second round.

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And Wales managed to get to the World Cup for the first time since 1958, only for old warhorses Aaron Ramsey and Wayne Hennessey to, respectively, clank about like he was wearing a suit of armour and nearly decapitate Iran’s Mehdi Taremi.

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There were some memes about Harry Kane’s penalty too, but we’re still quite sad about all that so we’ll just draw a veil if you don’t mind.

Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter

Obviously we’re all heartily sick of his shit now, especially now he’s gone full 4chan and started doing hack jokes about prosecuting Anthony Fauci. But the fact that Elon Musk decided the best use of his time, given that he has more money than any human being has ever had, was to spend all day deleting mean tweets about himself, is mad.

It’s not making him any more popular. He got booed when he came on stage at a Dave Chapelle gig the other day. Dave Chapelle! Even a Dave Chapelle crowd hates him!

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And let’s not forget the few days when you could just buy a blue tick, so loads of people did that, changed their handle and picture to some other massive account – George W Bush, Tony Blair, that sort of thing – and tweet extremely explicit stuff in their name. Then, so many people changed their name to ‘Elon Musk’, that became a meme in itself. Lots of people got banned. It was funny.

RIP Liz Truss’s political dreams

On 19 October, with her Home Secretary resigning in a huff and her new Chancellor merrily tearing up everything she and her other Chancellor had attempted to do, Truss declared at PMQs that she was “a fighter, not a quitter”. About 24 hours later, Truss announced she would resign as Prime Minister on 20 October.

After hitting every single pothole, trapdoor and banana skin that her government possibly could – and throwing in a couple more entirely unforced errors to boot – the Truss era collapsed in disarray. Ed ‘Chaos’ Miliband set up a potentially tricky vote in the Commons over fracking which, for some reason, the government turned into a quasi-confidence vote and told its MPs it was a three-line whip. Then it said it wasn’t. Then it said it was.

There was chaos in the voting lobby, with the chief whip reportedly resigning on the spot there, then Truss frogmarching her to an office to ask her to reconsider, and in the process not scanning her card to vote in her own confidence vote. Tory MP after Tory MP broke ranks to look opine on how much the party had disgraced itself. (The country? Never heard of her.)

Now, the lettuce thing has been written about by everyone up to and including the New York Times, and they’ve given the appropriate praise to the Daily Star’s livestream of a lettuce. That was very, very funny.

But all the lettuce material came from a leader article in The Economist on 11 October, which opened with one of the all-time great withering political assessments. Just for the sake of posterity, here it is: “Ms Truss entered Downing Street on September 6th. She blew up her own government with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy-price guarantees on September 23rd. Take away the ten days of mourning after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and she had seven days in control. That is roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce.”

Magnifique. And the internet really pulled out all the stops too.

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The interest rates on Da Bungalow mortgage must be pretty spicy.

RIP the pound

Well, at least you know now that whenever you start a new job it’ll never go as badly as the first three weeks Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng had.

The pound dipped to become worth almost the same as a dollar and the euro, the IMF had having kittens, and reporters said that pension funds would have been insolvent if the Bank of England hadn’t stepped in. Yep, the time you reply-alled to everyone at your company asking where the toilets were really pales into insignificance.

Not funny as the whole meltdown most definitely is (…isn’t?), the tweets have at least been good.

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RIP the actual Queen

Of course, the passing of the 96-year-old Queen was a big moment for the UK. But imagine hearing that she’d gone not from Huw Edwards at the start of his mammoth 11-day news bender, but from the British Kebab Awards.

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Or while innocently browsing for new nipple clamps.

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Liz Truss’s address to the nation took a bit of a turn.

And while all football was cancelled the weekend after the Queen’s death, the punditry fraternity marked her passing in its own way.

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Then there was The Queue. After a wait of up to 24 hours, mourners were finally able to pay their respects at her lying-in-state. It’s just hard to know what to do when you get there.

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RIP Adam Levine’s DMs

I mean.

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What can you say.

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About this kind of thing.

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Lordy, lordy.

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Madness.

The heatwave

Britain got its first peek into the deep, dark chasm of the climate crisis in mid-July, as record temperatures of 40.3 centigrade were registered in the south and most places got into the late thirties.

It was a very, very bad time. But the memes were decent.

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Boris Johnson finally fucks off

Even in the last six years of absolute clusterfucks, the 72 hours between Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak resignations as health secretary and chancellor and Boris Johnson finally admitting that maybe 50-odd resignations was one for the ages.

It was constitutionally horrifying, obviously, and the amount of time we’ve had to spend in the company of Suella Braverman in the aftermath has been very distressing. But it was also very, very, very funny.

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For seasoned watchers of political chaos, this was up there with the 2017 general election exit poll drop. The new ministers Johnson brought in to prop him up almost immediately joined the coup telling him he had to go. The resignations kept coming, alerting the general public to which MPs know how to use the scan document function in their Notes app and which don’t.

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Michelle Donelan was Education Secretary for 34 hours. Michael Gove threatened to resign at 9pm on the second day of the drama if Johnson didn’t go, only for Johnson to reportedly sack Gove a minute before his deadline. Andrea Jenkyns MP flipped a middle finger at crowds outside Downing Street. Johnson faced a select committee grilling where he admitted he’d met former KGB officer Alexander Lebedev in Italy just after the Skripal poisonings, and one of the committee members resigned on Twitter during the sitting.

As a final chef’s kiss, the Daily Mail thundered in with a bullish defence of Johnson’s position that hit newstands about two hours before he announced he was off.

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Finally, Johnson gave a speech which didn’t use the words ‘sorry’ or ‘apologise’ even once.

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And so the Tory leadership race started, and the crushing realisation that one of these dullards will be doing roughly the same dance in between 18 and 24 months’ time.

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Normal men, innocent men

It’s not often a puppet dog brings Twitter together, but CBBC’s Hacker T Dog managed it when a clip of him making his co-host Lauren Layfield corpse on air back in 2016 resurfaced.

It’s Vic and Bob for the under-12s. Despite a story doing the rounds that it’s based on something a mate of Hacker’s puppeteer said on a night out to some police officers, it was apparently just an off the cuff thing. Obviously, it’s been remixed.

Expect it to become the go-to quote-tweet response to any man displaying mildly weird behaviour in his day to day life.

Will Smith, Chris Rock, etc

It’s obviously old news now and, frankly, the discourse around slapgate is a rather played out. Was it funny? Or a disturbing? Both? Neither? The further we get from it, the harder it is to say.

However.

The memes were plenty, and many were actually far worse than either pearl-clutching or the attempts to exculpate Will Smith’s assault on Chris Rock. People seemed to really, really love the fact that a man had lost it and slapped another man in possibly the most public forum possible. But there were also some absolute pearlers in there too. So let’s enjoy them, then put them away.

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Even West Ham’s Michail Antonio got in on it.

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And then, of course, there was the moment we could all enjoy without feeling at all icky about it: former One Direction man Liam Payne stumbling through a Good Morning Britain interview at god knows what hour of the morning at Elton John’s Oscars do in LA, and bumping into several accents on his way along the red carpet.

He later explained that he was a bit tipsy.

“To tell you the truth, I was staying in a house with two German people, three people from Texas, one person from Liverpool and me,” he said on an Instagram Live. “It sounded like one of those jokes people say about an Irishman and an Englishman walk into a pub – and that’s what came out.”

Queen Elizabeth II is dead

…that’s right, dead excited about going to Itchy and Scratchy Land!

If you missed this one, it’s going to need some explaining. On 22 February, the gossip site Hollywood Unlocked posted an image of the Queen on Instagram.

“Sources close to the Royal kingdom [sic] notified us exclusively that #QueenElizabeth has passed away,” read the caption. “She was scheduled to attend the wedding of British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, but was found dead. Story developing.”

There followed a praying hands emoji and a heart emoji. Now, it was immediately obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of how the Royal Family does its business that this was roughly as likely as the Queen going down in a hail of police gunfire after a botched bank heist.

However Jason Lee, the founder and CEO of Hollywood Unlocked and the man apparently most certain that the Queen was dead, was not in a mood to back down.

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Lee insisted that despite his fundamental misunderstanding of what the Queen is – he seemed under the impression that she popped up at celeb weddings all the time, as if she’s got an ITV2 show to plug – he was in fact right. After a solid 24 hours of barracking, he came out fighting.

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In a way it was kind of heroic to see someone backing a take this titanically wrong.

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Lee was still not finished. On 25 February he tweeted out a story on the Hollywood Unlocked site, saying: “Here’s our update on the Queen Elizabeth story.”

With the most incredible brass neck, it was titled: “Fact Check: 10 Reasons We Believed Queen Elizabeth Was Dead”. The piece was full of gold. Lee was apparently contacted by “a high-profile attendee” at the Enninful wedding who’d overheard someone else getting upset on the phone about someone, possibly the Queen, having died.

“While many have scoffed at the idea that the Queen or anyone associated with her would ever attend Enninful’s wedding, not only is he fashion royalty in the UK, a quick Google image search easily pulls up pictures of him sharing intimate moments with members of the royal family,” read one section. These ‘intimate moments’ include Camilla sitting next to Enninful at a London Fashion Week show Charles meeting him at a Princes Trust do. Doesn’t get much more inner circle.

Lee added his view: “I can say my sources got this wrong and I sincerely apologise to The Queen and the Royal Family.” First rule of journalism: throw your sources under the bus.

So what happened? Popbitch, the connoisseur’s gossip site and email, proposed one possible explanation. The Queen, obviously, wasn’t meant to be at Enninful’s wedding – but on that same evening it was announced that Mark Lanegan had died.

Mark Lanegan, the former singer in Queens of the Stone Age.

Big Jet TV

As Storm Eunice kicked up and put most of the UK under a weather warning for wind, the general unease was lightened by the sterling work of Big Jet TV founder and presenter Jerry Dyer.

After livestreaming landings at major airports since 2016, Eunice was the breakout moment for Big Jet TV. More than 200,000 people watched as planes from all over the world jagged in toward the Heathrow runway, fighting against winds up to 70mph. It helped that it was a Friday, but it was gripping stuff. Bosh.

The vibe shift

A piece in New York magazine warned us that a trend forecaster had forecast a fundamental shift in what’s cool and what isn’t, and of the attitudes which will govern the next epoch of pop culture. The vibe shift was coming.

Quite what a vibe shift is and how it’s different from ‘getting older’ remains slightly unclear. But then maybe that’s just the vibe shift.

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I believed it was a work event

The rolling boil of scandal and revelation from Downing Street finally bubbled over properly in mid-January with a triple-whammy of allegations and thunderingly dumb attempts to justify very obviously not cool events.

To bring you up to speed: a picture emerged in the early days of January which showed Boris Johnson, his wife Carrie and around 20 other people hanging out in the garden at 10 Downing Street in May 2020. As you might recall, hanging out with glasses of wine in a mate’s garden was punishable by fines at the time. Johnson apologised in the Commons (well, kind of), and said that he knew the rules, obvs, but that he “believed implicitly that this was a work event”. This was not quite the slam dunk he perhaps hoped it would be.

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It was also rather undermined by an email from his permanent private secretary encouraging attendees to bring their own booze. And now we’re up to about 15 separate gatherings/parties/funky Fridays with a suitcase of Co-Op wine, and an internal investigation which has become its own meme, and a police inquiry.

And then it turned out that the interior designer Luly Lytle – who was at the centre of another, apparently unrelated scandal about exactly how a refurb of 10 Downing Street was funded – was there at yet another party, this time for Johnson’s 56th birthday. Yep, that would also have been against the rules.

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It’s been a hell of a couple of years for Johnson. Imagine returning an 80-seat majority and then fucking things so utterly that you’re getting bantered off by Ipswich Town.

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The crypto crash

Look, I’m not going to tell you that we truly understand any of what happened in late January, when a wobble in the cryptosphere turned into a full-on meltdown.

There were a lot of memes. This was one of them. That’s all we really know.

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Wordle

At a loose end after Christmas, the world was taken over by a simple word game with no ads, no in-app purchases and no ulterior motive.

Suddenly, everyone’s Twitter feed was overtaken by matrixes of green blocks as people shared how they’d got on with the day’s puzzle, and then by people screenshotting the fact they were blocking any mention of Wordle.

Wordle was in meme territory.

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Hey, buddy. You like Wordle?

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HOW D’YA LIKE THEM WORDLES.

Molly Mae Rand

The first major political storm of the year arrived before most of us had chucked the Christmas tree into the woodchipper.

Molly-Mae Hague went on the Diary of a CEO podcast and said: “You’re given one life and it’s down to you what you do with it. When I’ve spoken about that in the past, I have been slammed a little bit, with people saying, ‘It’s easy for you to say that, you’ve not grown up in poverty, you’ve not grown up with major money struggles, so for you to sit there and say that we all have the same 24 hours in a day, it’s not correct.’

“And I’m like, but technically what I’m saying is correct. We do – so I understand that we all have different backgrounds and we’re all raised in different ways and we do have different financial situations, but I do think if you want something enough, you can achieve it.”

Within a few hours, her Wikipedia entry had been amended so that her surname was Thatcher, and “best known for being the runner-up of the fifth series of Love Island, and for having worked harder than anyone less successful than her”.

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There are a lot of complex things tangling here. Yes, she’s spouted a load of bollocks there. A stint on Love Island is a handy leg-up into a £500,000 creative director gig with a major fast fashion retailer.

At the same time, this kind of hustle culture, rise-and-grind, millionaire mindset gibberish also comes out of a lot of blokes’ mouths and nobody goes after them. Granted, very few of them have £500,000 creative director gigs with major fast fashion retailers, but the inane ‘just work harder you idiot’ fantasy apparently isn’t as worthy of ridicule when its slogans are posted with a picture of Jeff Bezos.