29 Best Memes and Biggest Viral Moments of 2024

RuPaul’s Drag Race has been a reliable source of memes for almost its entire run, but this year’s most lasting viral moment came from a surprising contestant: Megami, a New York queen who tended to get overshadowed by other louder contestants. In an early talent show episode, Megami performed a very raw and earnest lip sync to 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” while clutching a rainbow Pride flag and a series of flipcards that ultimately urged voters to “protect queer art.” The sincerity of the performance didn’t quite land, however, and it instead turned into a cringe meme about bad queer art. The meme was set just days later when Meatball, another drag queen with a big online following, parodied the performance with a sign that read “Protect Bad Drag.”

Sometimes, from the ashes of a fiasco, internet glory takes flight. That’s what happened when a February event in Glasgow billed as a Willy Wonka-themed immersive experience quickly devolved into a sad spectacle of Shein-esque costumes and pathetic looking props. The shambolic incident was something of an internet event itself (to which many comparisons were drawn in September after a depressing Bridgerton-themed ball in Detroit also went viral), but it also birthed two major viral figures who were decidedly not from Roald Dahl’s imagination: a sad looking Oompa Loompa (played by Kirsty Paterson) standing at the candy equivalent of a meth lab, and a terrifying and age-inappropriate ghost-like figure called “The Unknown” (played by Felicia Dawkins).

If 2024 was the year we all had to learn what a “tradwife” is, who better to exemplify — or perhaps even parody? — this lifestyle than Nara Smith. A former model turned social media star  (more than 15.5 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, and Rolling Stone’s fourth most influential creator of 2024), Smith frequently posts videos of herself making ridiculous goods from scratch that are easily accessible in stores (think marshmallows, cola, and even toothpaste), which have inspired their own parodies about doing things the hard way. Smith’s breathy narration is always accompanied by her wearing increasingly outrageously glamorous pieces of couture as she toils away expressionless in her kitchen, leading to the impression that she’s in on the joke. Still, not everyone’s laughing; some have accused her of trying to be a poster child for Mormonism or conservative gender stereotypes.

Shahs of Sunset star Mercedes “MJ” Javid was the runner-up in Season Two of The Traitors, the Peacock competition show, brilliantly hosted by Alan Cumming, that pits reality stars against one another in a game similar to Werewolf or Mafia. MJ somehow made it to the final episode through sheer luck after mindlessly plodding her way through the competition, repeatedly failing to see what was in front of her. In one moment that went viral, she tried unsuccessfully to join other contestants who were huddling for a private strategy conversation, and was left standing awkwardly as she slowly backed out of the room. Her expression, her stance, and her outfit made for the perfect meme to represent social awkwardness.

Before the Royal Family shared with the world in March the news that Catherine, Princess of Wales (A.K.A. Kate Middleton), was battling breast cancer and temporarily stepping back from public life, an internet frenzy had been brewing for weeks about her apparent disappearance. Kate had not been seen in public since Christmas Day 2023, and online detectives had set about finding out the truth, frustrated by the Palace’s tight-lipped media strategy. There was speculation she and Prince William were divorcing, that she was in a coma, and that she’d been replaced with a body double. When a picture of the family was released in order to calm the public, the clearly edited photo had the opposite effect and only increased the chaos. Not everyone was taking it so seriously, though: shitposters had a ball guessing what the missing princess might be up to, from hiding in Barbieland to giving into a World of Warcraft addiction. In the end, the Palace learned an important lesson about PR, while the rest of us learned just how addictive and entertaining conspiracy theories can be.

Cosmo Lombino, aka. The Queen of Melrose, is a Los Angeles stylist and boutique owner who, evidently, has lived an extraordinary life. In March, she experienced a moment of fame in a TikTok clip in which she complained about the parking situation at a Madonna concert. But her real impact on 2024 meme culture came thanks to a clip taken from an interview she did with Mark Laita’s Soft White Underbelly YouTube channel. Wearing a fur poncho, clutching a cigarette, and speaking in a gravely New York accent, Lombino recounts growing up in a dysfunctional, drug addicted, Catholic-turned-Jehovah’s Witness family. Across X, Instagram, and TikTok, Lombino’s wild story became a meme about our tendency to overshare with colleagues, employers, and strangers you meet at bars.

Are you simply dying to see something on your friend’s phone? Perhaps a viral video or a celebrity thirst trap? Or maybe it’s footage of Jesus being seen in, er, Ohio? That’s what prompted the now iconic plea of desperation, “Show me to me, please. Send it to me, Rachel.” First posted by Rachel Thanasoulis in late 2022 as part of a TikTok trend of celebrity death pranks, the clip showing her mom Colleen tearfully demanding to see ~content~ became its own massively viral trend and sound on the platform this March and April.

A few years back, we all learned about “Main Character Energy,” a viral concept on self-centeredness often helpfully illustrated by Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) from Sex and The City. In 2024, Carrie was back again in a meme also about self-absorption, thanks to her obsession with Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and his sudden move to Paris in Season Two. In joke after joke on X and Instagram from March, people riffed on the meme with their own imagined versions of conversations between the SATC girls (or anyone really) that always ended with an ignorant Carrie declaring, “Big is moving to Paris.” In the words of another meme from a few years back, “Girl, move on!”

Novelty popcorn buckets were suddenly everywhere in 2024, but there was none more famous — or perhaps infamous — than that of Dune: Part Two. It even inspired an SNL sketch. There’s not much to say here beyond the fact that the bucket looked like something a guy might try to have sex with — and which at least one guy actually did (extremely NSFW link). Modeled after one of the movie’s sandworms, the final design more closely resembled a Fleshlight sex toy. Even director Denis Villeneuve told the New York Times his mind went straight to the gutter when he first saw it. If nothing else, the Dune popcorn bucket was a nice reminder that we’re all extremely juvenile online.

Tinashe’s song “Nasty” was a hit this summer on the charts and on social media after a video of Nate Di Winer, a bespectacled white dude with surprisingly great dance skills, was paired with the song. That sparked a TikTok trend in which cats, dogs, and even nuns showed off their nastiest (i.e. sexiest) moves. But the real poetry lay in Tinashe’s lyric, “Is somebody gonna match my freak?”, which instantly entered the cultural lexicon and sparked endless discourse on X when one user asked for examples of two people who actually did match one another’s freak.

When you pull up in the club’s VIP area, do you act trashy and loud? Or are you mindful of why you were invited to the section? That was the lesson on modesty and manners taught by Quill D Lux, the etiquette teacher behind @littlebrowncharmschool, whose 2022 video went viral in April on TikTok, where it spawned a slew of copycats (or perhaps it’s best to think of them as students who took the lesson to heart). As Quill further expounded in one comment, “Know when you’re invited to entertain and when you’re invited to enjoy the entertainment.”

Who knows of a video of a large and oddly adult-like baby demanding to be taken to a luxury hotel? [Raises hand] Meeeeee! Stefanie O’Brien’s TikTok from May showing her then almost 13-month-old niece Kate Wise has been seen more than 85 million times on the platform. In it, the “fully conscious” looking infant confidently raises a pointed hand when asked by mom Bailey, “Who wants to go to the Four Seasons Orlando?” Young Kate’s assertive taste for five-star accommodation prompted viral AI edits, endless X jokes, and an apparent sponsorship deal for the Wise family that’s taken them to Four Seasons hotels in London, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Miami, and — where else — Orlando. Get it, baby.

A social media star and Italian TV personality from a small town outside of Naples, Francesco Nozzolino looks like if Chef Gusteau from Ratatouille were a certified diva. This summer, Nozzolino went viral outside of Italy on X thanks to a GIF showing them in a very animated conversation while wearing a pink Palm Springs T-shirt (the GIF was taken from a May video Nozzolino had posted). Soon, the English-speaking internet discovered Nozzolino’s joyful TikTok account, including one viral video in which Nozzolino, wearing an orange tie-dye number, was giddily excited to be pelted with confetti. With an unflappably bubbly personality and makeup that’s always on point, Nozzolino became an avatar for unapologetic queer joy online amid a time of great darkness.

Former Nickelodeon child star Jennette McCurdy’s bombshell 2022 memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died has been a big hit with readers, spending significant time on the charts. In May, to celebrate 80 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, McCurdy posted a video to TikTok of her firing off a confetti cannon — with one big catch: she repeatedly told us she’s terrified of loud noises. So when the cannon finally exploded, McCurdy instantly let out a blood-curdling scream. The video had many TikTok commenters both worried for McCurdy and questioning her decision to use the cannon in the first place. The clip is now frequently used online to express terror at things that could be genuinely scary or just benign, but many online aren’t comfortable with a meme spawned from McCurdy’s apparent trauma. 

In hindsight, perhaps the clearest sign that Donald Trump was going to win the election was the overnight, inexplicable viral fame of Haliey Welch, aka. Hawk Tuah Girl. One evening this summer in Nashville, Welch answered a question about sex posed to her by YouTubers Tim Dickerson and DeArius Marlow with a guttural spitting sound (pronounced hôk too-ä) that soon became a catchphrase and made her into a cultural phenomenon with her own merch and podcast. Even Republicans and Democrats were apparently battling for her endorsement. While Welch has a real Southern charm to her and wisely kept herself out of politics (although she did try her hand at crypto, with controversial results), it’s hard not to think that her virality perfectly exemplified the sudden cultural prominence of what writer Max Read has called the “Zynternet” — a fratty online subculture geared towards Gen Z men that’s replete with sports gambling, crypto, Zyn nicotine pouches, and gender roles that mainly align with conservative politics. 

We’ve mentioned Harris a few times at this point, so it seems fitting we should acknowledge that while she didn’t win the 2024 election, she undoubtedly won the meme war — not that that is much consolation. Before President Joe Biden had even dropped out of the race, people online were announcing support for Harris by declaring they had been “coconut-pilled” — a reference to a now famous 2023 from her: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”  Harris has previously been ripe for meme fodder (see 2020’s “We did it, Joe”), but now fueled by a Gen Z, internet-savvy social media team, Harris memes quickly flooded the internet this summer and left the election “unburdened by what has been.” One particularly viral TikTok even combined the coconut tree quote with a Brat-inspired remix that would make Charli herself proud.

If you’re someone active on Stan Twitter who is prone to imagining enemies, you just might be seeing Clairo Shade. The Clairo in question is the singer-songwriter also known as Claire Cottrill, who has amassed an army of online defenders with tongue-in-cheek posts accusing anyone doing almost anything other than celebrating her music with — you guessed it — shading Clairo. The trend seems to have started in July with one facetious tweet accusing Katy Perry of possible Clairo Shade based on some questionable mental gymnastics. A similar leap of logic was also used to accuse Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez of Clairo Shade when they got divorced apparently because Clairo’s album Charm couldn’t save their marriage. In August, a group of lesbian Brooklynites even threw a rooftop party in Bushwick that featured a cake with a “Clairo Shade” decoration — a celebration that was soon derailed when a “twink” fell through a skylight. Something so dramatic and distracting happening at a party to celebrate Clairo? Now that’s Clairo Shade.

This was, of course, an Olympics year, and thanks to the Paris Games we scored a couple of medal-winning memes. The first came from the sharp shooting event where South Korea’s Kim Yeji and Turkey’s Yusuf Dikeç each went viral in pictures that captured their very different styles; she was laser focused and looked like someone from The Matrix (many praised her “main character energy”), while he looked impossibly relaxed with his hand in his pocket, as if he’d just wandered in off the street. Two other shooters who went viral were Choe Daehan, another South Korea competitor whose arched posture was a hit on Gay Twitter, and China’s Jiang Ranxin, whose no-nonsense expression as she cocked her pistol at the camera was used as a meme to express annoyance at, say, people who don’t read your prior email.

The other Olympic standout from Paris was the Australian breakdancer Raygun, who kangaroo-hopped her way into internet history with a woefully unimpressive performance in the sport’s debut appearance at the Games. Dressed like a dorky cricket player (with her shirt tucked into her pants, no less), 37-year-old university lecturer Rachel Gun rolled around on the floor in a series of movements that earned her exactly zero points but caused her to go viral on Reddit, X, and practically everywhere else. Controversy followed, with many questioning how she ended up representing her country at the Games in the first place. In November, Raygun announced she’d be taking an indefinite hiatus from breakdancing, but only after she became an iconic meme about being out of your depth, somewhat deluded, and, well, dancing like a kangaroo.

Exactly how online are you? A good test is whether when you see this picture of a rain chart, your mind turns to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. A 2003 BBC graphic that showed how Hussein had been concealing himself prior to his capture by U.S. forces featured a small red figure laying down in what has since become a distinctive pose. That graphic has gone viral several times in the last decade, but in 2024 TikTokers started a trend in which they spotted the Hussein figure shape in everything from chicken tenders to ham to toilet paper to Cheetos. It seems our minds have been collectively melted by the internet. No wonder the word “brain rot” was named as the word of the year.

Maybe 2024 was just one big etiquette lesson online because by August we were all being advised to act “very demure, very mindful” by TikToker Jools Lebron. The trans beauty influencer posted a video over the summer about how she does her makeup for work by keeping things simple and avoiding looking “like a clown.” Maybe it was just Lebron’s use of the old-fashioned sounding “demure,” but her lesson rapidly blew up and even spawned comparisons to Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Eventually, the White House joined in on the trend, which was probably a sign the meme was over.

It’s no secret that the internet is a sucker for a cute baby animal, and thanks to Thailand’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo we were truly blessed this year with the arrival of pygmy hippopotamus Moo Deng. Often photographed in various states of blur and with her mouth agape, Moo Deng frequently appeared to be terrified — by her handlers, by water hoses, by the world at large — which is perhaps why it felt so satisfying to see her fighting back by chomping on practically everything around her. Soon, she was a worldwide superstar: Bowen Yang played her on SNL, at least one New Yorker flew all the way to see her, and she was blamed for correctly predicting Trump would win the election. In chaotic times, Moo Deng became an avatar for babygirls everywhere, forced against our best wishes to engage with the world, but determined to at least look impossibly moisturised while doing so.

If there were a runner up in the 2024 animal meme sweepstakes, it would have to be Pesto, the impossibly chonky and fluffy young penguin in Melbourne, Australia. In July, Pesto broke the record for the biggest baby penguin ever born at the Sea Life Aquarium, weighing about 44 lbs when he was just six months old. Online, he was described as an “absolute unit” and a “massive fatty,” but many found it endearing that despite his giant size he was just a mommy’s boy deep down. Before he turned into an angsty teenager and dropped most of his fluff, Pesto drew unusually big crowds to the aquarium; even Olivia Rodrigo went to visit with him when she was in town. Pesto-mania took off shortly after Moo Deng turned into a superstar, and although some people tried to pit the two icons against one another, the rest of us know there will always be room for unlimited cute animals online.

Broad City was one of the best comedies of the 2010s, and while many may have been hoping it would experience a cultural resurgence, few could have predicted the line that would trigger it. In October, thanks to a viral video posted by comedian Maggie Winters, TikTokers discovered an exchange from a 2016 episode in which Ilana (Ilana Glazer) tries a little too hard as she explains to Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) a nightclub’s sense of camaraderie. Almost 250,000 videos were subsequently posted to TikTok making use of the sound — including ones by Sabrina Carpenter, Troye Sivan and Charli XCX, and Usher and Kamala Harris  — and the phrase also went viral on X with jokes about Bottoms, Succession, and Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club.” After the divisive presidential election, the phrase was repurposed again by the likes of Bob The Drag Queen, who wrote, “OMG. I just realized that we were never all fam in the clerb.”

In late September, mysterious posters started appearing around Manhattan’s Greenwich Village advertising a “Timothée Chalamet Look-alike Competition” with a cash prize of $50. While these ads would eventually inspire copycat parodies (“Pedro Pascal lookalike competition at my house tonight,” wrote one Pedro Pascal fan account), one big question remained: would anyone actually show up? The answer was a resounding yes. On Oct. 28, throngs of people descended on Washington Square Park (including the real Timothée Chalamet) to watch the best fake Timmy be crowned. The contest was the brainchild of YouTuber Anthony Po, whose idea soon spread to cities around the world: a Harry Styles look-alike competition in London, a Jeremy Allen White competition in Chicago (and a separate one in New York), a Dev Patel one in San Francisco, a Jake Schlossberg one in D.C., and a Paul Mescal event in Dublin. At a Glen Powell lookalike competition in Austin, the winner was decided by Powell’s mother and aunt, with the prize being a cameo in Powell’s next movie. While playwright Jeremy O. Harris mused that the competitions were “so Great Depression-era coded,” Amanda Hess at the New York Times hypothesized the events’ popularity came down to them being a fun, insignificant democratic event held around the same time of another decidedly not fun, extremely significant democratic event. For many though, the appeal was even simpler: a chance to hook-up with someone who maybe kinda sorta looks like a celebrity. Jake Gyllenhall look-alike contest at my house tonight.

At times, the press tour for the Wicked movie could feel almost unending, as the stars sat for countless interviews around the world, and Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo often — too often? — became emotional in the process. Perhaps that’s why their brains (and ours) were primed to break in half when Out journalist Tracey Gilchrist told them that following the U.S. election she’d seen people on social media “taking the lyrics of ‘Defying Gravity’ and really holding space with that, and feeling power in that.” Gilchrist later confessed she was surprised by the speed with which Erivo responded with such sincerity to the statement — so much that she couldn’t even finish asking her intended question. But their serious and saccharine exchange about something so silly and vague — as well as Grande’s decision to delicately hold Erivo’s finger as a gesture of support — made the moment go wildly viral when it was posted to X in late November. The New York City Gay Men’s Choir even set the moment to music — the lyrics of which we will all no doubt be holding space for and feeling power in for years to come.