Alright, the ice is melting between us: 15 popular memes and their meanings

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Who is Zhdun, what is "vzhuh" and why everyone around is singing "The ice is melting between us" - Lifehacker studied a ton of funny pictures in the largest Russian social network "VKontakte" and compiled a guide to the most popular memes.

1. Waiting

Probably everyone who has ever used social networks has come across pictures of Zhdun. However, not everyone knows the origin story of this meme. The picture shows a sculpture by Dutch artist Margrit van Brifort called Homunculus Loxodontus, which translates as "elephant-like man". The incomprehensible creature combines the features of a seal and an elephant and depicts a patient sitting in line to see a doctor.

Adaptations of this meme are accompanied by witty captions: "I pressed something, and everything disappeared", "What, the source code had to be saved?" and dozens of others.

2. Salty handsome

Outrageous chef Nusret Goekce is the manager of Nus-Et steak house in Dubai. Nusret cooks great, and this is expressed not only in the taste of the dishes, but also in the way the cooking process looks like. In every gesture of the cook, love for his work and remarkable artistry are manifested.

The popularity of Nusret was brought about by his manner of salting the steak: the cook takes a pinch of coarse salt and lets it “drain” onto the meat up to the elbow. This gesture with an elegantly raised hand became the basis of the meme.

3. Ukraine and VKontakte

On May 16, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko issued a decree on new sanctions against Russia, including restricting Ukrainian users' access to Yandex, social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. Of course, such locks have many workarounds, but this does not prevent some users from being outraged, and others from making funny pictures on this topic.

The most popular was the shot from "Fast and the Furious" with cars driving away at a fork. One of the cars depicts the VKontakte logo, the other - the flag of Ukraine.

4. Drake dance

This meme already has a solid beard, but new pictures continue to pop up on the vastness of social networks to this day. The dance from the Hotline Bling video became a popular meme in America in an instant: users made hundreds of Coub videos, substituting different music for the performer's movements.

Drake's expressive facial expressions gave rise to pictures-memes and on the Runet. The template with two subjects and Drake's reaction to each of them became popular. The first object causes rejection: the artist frowns his eyebrows and fenders off with his palm. Drake likes the second: he breaks into a satisfied smile.

5. Be like Petya

"Be like Petya" is a meme that came to Russia from the vastness of the Western Internet. The original picture with primitive graphics and clever Tim was uploaded by an anonymous user back in March 2010. The style of storytelling was picked up by Australian airlines, and hundreds of adaptations appeared on the Internet, but with a clever Bill. The original contained the following text: “Tim is on the Internet. Tim sees something that bumps him. Tim walks by. Tim is smart. Be like Tim."

Pictures with clever Petya give users simple life advice. They are pretty obvious, but each of us can name at least a couple of people who do not follow these tips.

6. Keyod Evumi

Keiod Evumi is an actor whose face is often seen on the vastness of social networks. The image itself is from The Hood Documentary, where Keyoda's character talks about his girlfriend: "I think Rachel is beautiful because she can work her head well."

As a rule, Keyode gives advice that will bring a smile rather than prove to be really useful.

7. Harold hiding pain

Harold is a character discovered by users on the Dreamstime photo stock. A good-natured smile, combined with suffering in the eyes, ensured the success of photographs with an unknown elderly man.

Initially, the story about a kind old man who is forced to be photographed in the form of a happy grandfather gained popularity. Over the years, pictures of Harold were used to show painful or embarrassing feelings with an insincere smile on their face.

8. Mister Dudets

The image with a skull playing a trumpet became popular on Runet last fall. According to legend, Mr. Dudets will bless everyone who writes: "Thank you, Mr. Dudets!" With calcium and strong bones.

The first documented image of Dudts dates back to 1995, after which it was forgotten for almost 20 years. Dudets found a new life in 2016 thanks to Dvach. One image with a skull playing a trumpet was enough to turn the thread into an endless series of "Thank you, Mr. Dude!" So anonymous discredited any dialogues in the topics of the forums "Dvacha". Dudets became popular and leaked to social media.

Aside from its classic uses, the meme appears frequently in music videos. The most popular was the video where Dudets plays a song by Australian DJ Timmy Trumpet.

9. Ice is melting between us

This line from the viral song "Mushrooms" on social networks has been so common in recent months that a petition has even appeared on Change. Org against the widespread use of the phrase.

It all started with the band's official video released on March 10th. He spawned dozens of parodies, the lines from the song are played out in funny pictures, Instagram users shoot videos to the hit "Mushrooms", putting the appropriate hashtags.

10. Supermind

The expanding brain meme appeared on Reddit as a variation on the Whomst meme. The fact is that many English-speaking users confuse who and whom. Pictures with the Overmind meme are a series of compared pictures with the corresponding brain size for each one. In this case, as a rule, the smallest brain corresponds to the most adequate option. So, in the adaptation of the Whomst meme, the use of who and whom in speech belonged to people with small and medium brains, and the owners of the superintelligence corresponded to the use of non-existent forms whom’st and whomst’d in speech.

11. Sergey Druzhko

Many remember the pseudo-documentary program "Inexplicable, but a fact" and its eccentric presenter Sergei Druzhko. A resident of St. Petersburg Nikita Afanasyev with his friend once remembered her. Friends decided to feel nostalgic for childhood while watching a program about supernatural phenomena. The show itself seemed boring to them, but the presenter's out-of-context and dramatic phrases amused the young people.

Once Nikita decided to answer a friend with the phrase of Sergey Druzhko "Are things really that bad?" To do this, he hastily cut out this moment from the program and uploaded it to the video files of the newly created VKontakte public. The find was right: dozens of other phrases from “Inexplicable, but true” were uploaded to the public, and the number of subscribers soon reached tens of thousands.

The original public was closed due to copyright problems, but the author's case still lives on. There are more and more video clips with Sergey Druzhko for all occasions, and the presenter himself did not oppose the sudden popularity and launched Druzhko Show on YouTube.

12. Vzhuh the cat

The peak of popularity of this meme has already passed, but on the social network you can still stumble upon pictures with a wizard cat.

A photo with a cat in a festive hat appeared on the English-speaking Internet in 2013. The image also spread in Runet, but the meme took on its usual form only in 2016. An anonymous user cut out the image of a cat, put a magic wand in its paw, and drew magic in the form of lurid spray outlines in Paint. And he finally designed the meme by adding the phrase "Vzhuh", a user under the nickname Man-In Gabba.

Pictures with a wizard cat are accompanied by captions about some sudden action, as if at the behest of a magic wand.

13. Mined sneaker

Whether or not to laugh at this meme is a moral question, and we'll leave it to you to answer. After all, the reason for the inadequacy of some internet celebrities is usually unfortunate. But the facts are unshakable: a thief in law who survived an assassination attempt by blowing up a mined sneaker is a hit on social media.

The original video was released on the user's YouTube channel under the nickname Gor Hakobyan in early May. The author was driving along a country road and saw a man sitting in the mud. Asking what happened to him, the operator did not even suspect that he had stumbled upon an "authority" whose sneaker was mined by ill-wishers.

14. Come on, tell me

The meme is based on the facial expressions of actor Gene Wilder from the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In 2011, the phrase You must be new here was added to the frame from the film, which translates as "You must be new here." In Runet, the line has changed to "Come on, tell me …" The following is a phrase corresponding to the context.

Sometimes the text in the pictures with this meme deviates from the template, because the expression on Gene Wilder's face already suggests that the sender does not believe the addressee of the message. By sending a picture with this meme, you seem to be telling the interlocutor: "I know that you are lying to me, but you go on …"

15. Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen

Piko Taro is a fictional character of Japanese DJ and comedian Kazuhito Kosaki. In a popular video, Pico sings a song about combining a pen and an apple, a pen and a pineapple, an apple pen and a pineapple stick together. Some might say that this makes little sense. It is, but the funny video sequence, the obsessive motive and the lightness of the composition ensured the video a place in the top of YouTube and became the basis for many parodies.

The meme did not last long in active Internet rotation, but new videos still appear on Pico Taro's YouTube channel, gaining millions of views.