SUBSCRIBE

YEAR IN REVIEW

The 21 Most Defining

Memes of 2023
From viral dances to lil-stinker promo shots
to songs we couldn't get our of our heads,
our favorite Very Online moments of the
past years
BY JULIA REINSTEIN
DECEMBER 10, 2023

KATE GREEN/BAFTA/GETTY IMAGES/BAFTA; EUGENE

GOLOGURSKY/GETTY IMAGES/MACY'S, INC; TONY
ESPARZA/CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

2 0 2 3 W A S A heck of a year on the

internet. Whether we were eating our girl
dinners or declaring our allegiances in the
orca wars, this year was jam-packed with
memes that captivated us even harder than
the Roman Empire. The following are some
of the most defining memes of 2023, from
nepo babies to babygirl. Here’s to our
bygone memes, and may 2024 be as
fruitful.

KATE GREEN/BAFTA/GETTY IMAGES/BAFTA

Angela Basset Did

21 the Thing
In 2014, there was Ellen’s Oscars selfie.
2017 had Meryl Streep yelling, and 2022
had The Slap. In February, Ariana DeBose
joined the grand tradition of award show
memes when she opened the BAFTA Film
Awards with a song shouting out many of
the night’s female nominees: “Angela
Bassett did the thing / Viola Davis, my
woman king / Blanchett, Cate, you’re a
genius / And Jamie Lee, you are all of us!”
DeBose rapped.

It was then that DeBose joined yet another

grand tradition: getting bullied for being a
theater kid. The performance was widely
panned as cringey, and she was roasted
online so mercilessly she deleted her
Twitter. But in the days that followed, more
and more people (GayTwitter especially)
came around and even celebrated it for
looking camp right in the eye. A week later,
Bassett brought the meme full circle when
she took the stage at the NAACP Image
Awards after winning Entertainer of the
Year. “I guess Angela Bassett did the
thing!” she said in her acceptance speech,
to raucous applause. Don’t you just love a
happy ending?

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

YOUTUBE/DAFUQ!?BOOM!

20 Skibidi Toilet

Gen Alpha, welcome to the meme canon.

“Skibidi Toilet,” the bizarre YouTube series
started by Georgian animator Alexey
Gerasimov (aka DaFuq!?Boom!) in
February, features animated heads popping
out of toilets and singing along to “Give It
To Me” by Timbaland. The series exploded
in popularity throughout 2023 — the
channel now has over 36 million
subscribers, and many of the Skibidi Toilet
videos have been viewed tens of millions of
times.

Many Gen Zers, who for years had mocked

millennial meme culture, were baffled by
the absurdist nature of Skibidi Toilet, and
for the first time saw a glimpse of how time
comes for us all. “We are the next cringe
generation on the chopping block,”
@thehannahmichelle said in a TikTok. “I’m
only 18 I can’t be getting old already,”
lamented @twelvehh.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

TWITTER

19 Boston Cop Slide

A video of a Boston police officer taking a

tumble out of a playground slide began
circulating online in August, and went viral
even faster than the uniformed cop shot
facedown out of the metal tube. Though the
clip’s origins are unclear, police confirmed
it was real, saying the unidentified officer
had been on duty at the time and suffered
minor injuries.

The video was slapstick perfection, almost

too funny to be adequately described. Of
course, memes ensued. People got really
creative, editing versions where the cop
knocks over a bunch of bowling pins, gets
sucked back up the slide in reverse, and
even clangs down to the drum fill of “In The
Air Tonight.”
The slide even became a bit of a tourist
destination, with so many thrill-seekers
making pilgrimages to try it out for
themselves that the city had to fence it off
at night. Someone even made it a location
on Google Maps.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

JAAP BUITTENDIJK/WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Timothée
18 Chalamet as
Wonka
When the trailer for Wonka, the new
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prequel
starring Timothée Chalamet, dropped in
July, the early reviews were unanimous:
“Bro is trying so hard to be whimsical,” one
Twitter user, @Trey_Explainer, so
cuttingly put it. “He is just not a silly little
guy,” @CosmonautMarcus tweeted.

One line in particular became a huge point

of derision: “You see, I’m something of a
magician, inventor, and chocolate maker.
So quiet up, and listen down. Nope, scratch
that, reverse it,” Chalamet says in the
trailer, delivering the line in a somewhat
stiff, awkward manner. Naturally, it
became a hugely viral sound on TikTok,
with people lipsyncing along to it and
leaning hard into the cringe.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

BELINDA JIAO/GETTY IMAGES

17 Tube Girl

Malaysian model and influencer Sabrina

Bahsoon was crowned TikTok’s newest it
girl this fall after her videos dancing and
lip-syncing on the London Underground,
which she began posting in August, went
massively viral. “Tube girl,” as she became
known, was praised for her confidence to
film in public (in 0.5, of course), and
inspired many others to recreate the trend
themselves. The “tube girl” meme was
simple but blew up on a massive scale —
Bahsoon’s TikToks garnered millions of
views, she gained hundreds of thousands of
followers seemingly overnight, celebrities
made their own versions, and Bahsoon
herself even walked in fashion shows in
London, Paris, and Milan.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

Congress’s Vote
16 for Speaker of the
House
Arguably one of the most secondhand-
embarrassing moments in political history
took place in the very first week of 2023,
when it took a whopping 15 tries for Rep.
Kevin McCarthy to get elected Speaker. For
four days straight, hundreds of thousands
of Americans tuned in to C-SPAN to watch
the hot mess unfold, and online, McCarthy
got brutally clowned on. “Imagine being in
your 60s and having to beg to be popular in
Congress…student council–ass behavior,”
comedian Caleb Hearon tweeted.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

TONY ESPARZA/CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

15 Kevin James

In September, a stock photo of Kevin

James — hands in pockets, shoulders
shrugged, smirking like a lil’ stinker — took
over as a meme. The King of Queens actor’s
quirky headshot, which according to
KnowYourMeme was taken on set in 1998,
first appeared as a meme on Twitter when
user @ChampagneAnyone captioned it “me
after 1 double rum and diet.” It became a
huge reaction image after that, appearing in
a ton of viral tweets.

It then found new life on TikTok, where

people used it to highlight their favorite
songs, typically in a two-slide slideshow.
The first slide would show a room full of
annoyed partygoers, captioned “who tf put
this song on?”, before panning over to
reveal James manning the AUX, often
thematically photoshopped in full stan
attire.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

SUBSCRIBE

21 - 17 16 - 12 11 - 7 6-2 1-1

SEAN DRAKES/GETTY IMAGES

14 Big Red Boots

A humongously clunky pair of bright red

boots hit the fashion world in February,
and became a meme before they were even
available to purchase. Created by art
collective MSCHF, the $350 rubbery
crimson clompers are described online as
“extremely shaped like boots” and “if you
kick someone in these boots they go boing.”
The boots were spotted on celebrities and
influencers (who were likely gifted or
loaned a pair) all over New York Fashion
Week in February, and became the subject
of widespread mockery online.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

CHAD FISH/AP

Chinese Spy
13 Balloon
In February, a Chinese balloon floated into
North America’s airspace…and into 2023
meme history. Officials said the high-
altitude object, which became popularly
known as the “Chinese spy balloon,” was
believed to have been sent for surveillance
purposes. The Air Force shot it down after a
few days, and the whole thing definitely
wasn’t great for U.S.-China relations, but
our nation’s noble posters had a heck of a
lot of fun with it while it lasted.

A D V E RT I S E M E N T

BRUCE GLIKAS/GETTY IMAGES

12 Nepo Babies

Since Hollywood’s earliest days, stars have

been giving their children a leg up in the
industry, bestowing upon them a shortcut
to success they might otherwise have never
achieved. But it wasn’t until this year a
term was popularized to describe these
second-gen celebs: nepotism babies, more
commonly known as “nepo babies.”

The descriptor first blew up in February

2022, thanks to a Euphoria fan’s tweet
after she found out Maude Apatow’s “mom
is Leslie Mann and her dad is a movie
director” (side note, lmao). At the end of
December 2022, New York magazine
published a deep-dive into the “nepo-verse”
tracing the star-studded family trees of
celebrities like Maya Hawke, Ben Platt and
Gracie Abrams. Naturally, discourse
ensued, catapulting the term into
mainstream usage in early 2023 and
becoming one of the first major memes of