Memes appear on the Internet quite spontaneously. Once a user uploads a funny picture, someone immediately adds a witty comment to it. A successful meme spreads around the world in a few hours.
Internet meme
Few people are not familiar with thousands of memes on the World Wide Web. For those who are in the tank, this term refers to a phrase, picture, occupation, which formed spontaneously and quickly gained popularity. Among the most popular and well-known are the “little face”, “stubborn fox”, “suspect dog”, “catastrophe girl”, “the toastmaster is good, and the contests are interesting”.
Where did the concept of "meme" come from? Many consider it a neologism of recent years, formed on the Internet. However, this assumption is fundamentally wrong.
This term is quite old and was first used in 1976 by Professor Richard Dokkins in his work “The Selfish Gene”:
A meme is a unit of cultural information that can spread lightning fast.
The term did not enter the active vocabulary, but surfaced in 1994 when it was used by Douglas Rothschild as a definition of a particular type of media virus.
And the host is good, and the competitions are interesting
Where did this expression come from? Who first used it and when?
The origin and author of each particular meme is not always possible to determine with absolute accuracy. Too spontaneously they arise and spread quite rapidly.
Three years ago, in 2015, in the “The Suffering Middle Ages” public book, created by historian students, a meme “and the toastmaster is good and the contests are interesting” appeared, from where he quickly moved to the Picabu portal, and already there he quickly gained popularity.
Initially, he appeared with this picture:
Priest reciting prayer and dance of naked people around.
Inexhaustible source of irony
In just a few months, the phrase was replicated in hundreds of different pictures and videos.
It is not surprising that a traditional Russian wedding with a toastmaster fell into the sight of Internet-jokers sharp in the language. The reality is that even in the 21st century, most of the leading weddings still have not departed from Soviet traditions and style.
Typical wedding competitions, designed for a tipsy audience, are usually vulgar and primitive. Interestingly, the vast majority of pictures with this meme are real wedding photos.
This meme is not a tracing-paper from any foreign joke and gained distribution exclusively in RuNet. Perhaps, due to its specificity and understandability, only the Russian-speaking part of the population.