The Best Memes of 2021, Because the Internet Is You
This year's greatest hits, from red flags to Beatles gags
So here we are, spinning into the soggier, mulchier portion of 2021, the year that was meant to be not like the previous year. How's that going? Yes, we're sick of it all, but one of the few bright spots of the last year was that all the extra time we had to devote to pottering around online led to some truly choice memes.
So, we've collected the best memes of 2021 here for you. The best memes from 2020 are right here, though we understand if you don't want to put yourself through all that again.
The happy side, sad side bus meme
A very simple one, which perhaps explains its brief ubiquity. There's something very cute about it, something very not-2021. That's probably because it comes from 2013, one of the years in Earth's existence you could accurately describe as 'not 2021'.
The original artist of the cartoon, the Brazilian Genildo Ronchi, uploaded his actual cartoon to Instagram recently in the wake of the meme's popularity.
It's titled 'Sometimes It Just Depends On Us', and the Portuguese legend overlaid on the cartoon reads: "Choose the happy side of life!" Which is nice, if a little overoptimistic if you happen to be sat on the grim side of the bus aisle during a grisly, jam-packed 7am Tuesday run through Warrington. There is no sunny side of the bus in Warrington.
A whole load of Beatles gags
The perfect storm of a Thanksgiving weekend release, a treasure trove of new raw material for memes and an undimming urge for daftness turned The Beatles: Get Back into a rich seam of very stupid memes. Some decided to subtly rewrite history.
Others appreciated big Mal Evans, the band's roadie, looking absolutely delighted to have the chance to bonk an anvil with a hammer to add some sound effects to rehearsals, or quite how intensely snoozy Ringo seemed for most of the Twickenham days.
Yet others gloried in the array of late-Sixties royalty who dropped in on sessions for Get Back: Peter Sellers, Linda McCartney, Yoko, Alan Parsons, and London's swingingest Shaguar driver.
And Paddington.
Truly, the fifth Beatle.
Red flags
This one's not so fantastic a concept in and of itself, but its mayfly existence is a fascinating encapsulation of the meme life cycle. First, you have your breakout hits like the one above. They tend to be easily legible to a massive number of people, so everyone knows the crack with the format, tone and intent of the meme.
This one's extremely simple. You say something you don't believe in quote marks, and then whack a load of red flag emojis after the statement to imply this is a reason you should be extremely wary of the
Now everyone knows what they're doing with it, they toddle off and start
Then you get the overexposure point, where the gag has been done to death and lost its in-crowd eligibility to become the kind of thing your auntie sends you. This happens to most memes; it's only a very select few Meme Hall of Famers, like Distracted Boyfriend, which transcend their popularity and stay funny in perpetuity even as their actual presence drains away. There is one very clear signal that a meme has gone full dad joke.
We've seen middle managers doing very snotty "cover letters with spelling mistakes in" gags for this one, which is deeply lame. At some stage either immediately before or immediately after this point, someone will point out why the thing everyone's doing is actually not brilliant. In the case of the red flag meme, it's the extremely reasonable point that people who use screen readers – those who are blind or visually impaired, for instance – were finding their Twitter feeds gunked up by these emojis which their readers would render as "triangular flag on post" repeatedly.
And then it's all over. The meme evaporates, its ones and zeroes reincorporated into the digital water cycle. The great cosmic ballet goes on.
The great Facebook and Instagram and some other stuff outage of 2021
For six days in early October, Facebook, Instagram and Messenger suddenly fell over and it was all very briefly exciting. Reddit went absolutely off its head for a bit. Twitter was the place to be, as if it was 2014 all of a sudden. There was a giddy, snow day vibe to everything. People memed. And then everything came back, and all was as bad as it was before.
GB News
When Andrew Neil signed off from his first two-week stint in the big chair at GB News, he told viewers they "ain't seen nothing yet". By god, how true it was.
After a strong showing in the ratings for the launch night, things rather went downhill. The sound was glitchy. The tech didn't work. At one minute to showtime one evening, Neill was told by his director all the external comms were down, so he had no guests and had to fill, on his own, for an hour. The studio was so badly lit it was hard to make out whether we it was the guy from Coast railing against the bloody woke brigade destroying our heritage and blah blah blah or an archive clip of Rick Wakeman on Grumpy Old Men.
And then Simon McCoy – once a respected BBC presenter with a flair for an acerbic aside – had to ask people not to send in correspondence signed off by such luminaries as Mike Hunt, Mike Oxlong, and Hugh Janus.
Just when things couldn't get any sillier, this bastion against cancel culture cancelled one of its own, Guto Harri, who was sacked after taking the knee during a chat about whether England's footballers ought to be doing it.
Changes were rung. Nigel Farage, who'd been on the edge of nearly every conversation about GB News anyway, got his own show. Neil retreated to his house in the south of France. As Private Eye pointed out, come September the Andrew Neill Show had been hosted exactly eight times by Andrew Neill, and many more times by people who weren't.
In mid-September he hit the ejector button and told the Daily Mail that the stress of running GB News nearly made him have a breakdown. The sympathy among Neill's colleagues in broadcast media has been muted. GB News has ironed out some of the kinks, but we'll always have Hugh Janus.
Soft men, hard men, man men soft times men hard
Obviously fuck L*urence F*x, but we did at least get to witness first hand the first case of poster's brain so advanced that the patient's frontal cortex fully inverted.
Larry, Larry, slow down. Have you had any water today? Have some water.
Ah, the Olympics
A year later than billed and not exactly wildly popular in Tokyo and Japan at large, the Olympics finally pitched up and did what the Olympics always does: grab you by the heartstrings every 20 minutes and make you tear up at the sight of some sporting excellence in a discipline you had no idea existed until Lutalo Muhammad told you it did.
But even before the Olympics kicked off/fired the starting pistol/slapped its legs and tried to grab its opponent's lapels, there were memes.
Those cardboard 'anti-sex beds' turned out not to be a prophylactic at all, just a recyclable frame which could really take some punishment, as various athletes showed by launching themselves onto them on social media. The memes, though, continued. One alternative: appropriate softboi stoner culture.
After everything we've been through, it felt like there was an even gauzier, softer focus to proceedings. Nobody got ripped to shreds, and there was a lot of understanding toward Simone Biles' decision to step back from competition, outside of the doughy middle-aged ex-Good Morning Britain presenter corpus.
Two of the standout moments of the Games epitomised that vibe. There was the Irish athletes' entrance at the Opening Ceremony, a gesture of humility and respect which was only added to by the Final Fantasy victory music playing at the time.
And there was gold medal-winning diver Tom Daley, who finally made it to the peak of his sport. When he wasn't spinning and twirling toward water at speed, he was knitting like a demon.
A little bag for his gold medal, a scarf for a
little Furby-like mascot, and a truly astounding cardigan commemorating
the whole Games. What a champ.
Bean dad
Back in January, John Roderick decided he would tweet about a bit of parenting he seemed quite proud of. His nine-year-old daughter didn't know how to open a tin of beans, and he refused to help her. She'd have to figure it out herself, while he live-tweeted what happened.
Naturally, this up-by-the-beanstraps approach to bringing up a child was met with mixed reviews. 'Bean dad' became Twitter's main character for a couple of days. He was the archetype of a Machiavellian tyrant.
Roderick deactivated his Twitter account not long afterwards, when people pointed out that he was being an arse and then – of course! – some anti-Semitic and racist tweets resurfaced. Every single time.
Anakin and Padme
One thing we've been really missing in 2021 is an endlessly remixable meme format – a Marriage Story argument scene, a Man Phwoaring At Woman In Front Of Girlfriend. Now, at last, we have it.
It's taken from the bit of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones where Anakin and Padme exchange woo in a field while also discussing the relative merits of dictatorships and pluralist democracy, and specifically the bit where Anakin endorses totalitarianism. Now, the meme's a handy way of pointing out when something you thought was going to go well has actually spiralled into something deeply disappointing.
Really miss that little car. Quite a few of the best ones are about the vagaries of technology, and quite how irritating different file formats can be.
And there's this one, which is just magnificent.
And finally: a meme from the early Seventies.
Poor David Marshall
Scotland's big day at Hampden Park didn't go quite to plan. Their return to a major championship ended in a 2-0 loss, and the second goal was a frankly jaw-dropping ping from the halfway line after goalkeeper David Marshall had gone for a sandwich. Marshall's doomed leap after the ball got a memeing, as did his slightly undignified trajectory into the back of the net.
Poor old David Marshall. It's a meme which, looking at it from this end of the England-Scotland draw, managed to tie together two eternally repeating motifs of sport: Scottish plucky loserism, and English hubristic wankerdom. Within days, the hearty fnarr-ing at Marshall had turned to ash in England fans' mouths. Don't even mind it! Feels good. Feels right.
That Marvel mega-trailer
The huge dump of new Marvel stuff which welcomed in the start of Phase 4 by announcing dates for (deep breath) Black Panther 2, Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Spider-Man 3, Doctor Strange 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder did lend itself to a memeing. In the onslaught of new stuff, you could very easily have missed a few announcements. For what it's worth, we'd absolutely watch a mash-up of Mamma Three-a and a rebooted X-Men. Imagine it: Julie Walters jiving around to 'Ring Ring' on Kalokairi while Michael Fassbender does one of his big grimaces. Those mutants wouldn't stand a chance.
The Oscars at large
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