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15 Popular Internet Image Memes Explained

It all started with the “O RLY?” owl—the first advice animal. Since the inception of that owl several years ago, the Internet has proliferated in countless new advice animals, most of which aren’t even animals.

You may encounter these advice animals, or image memes, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and pretty much every website on the internet, but they’re often without any sort of explanation and unless there’s more than one of them (or if you’ve seen more than one of them) it can be difficult to figure out what’s going on.

These memes have been distilled down to their base meanings and the explanations are pretty damn hilarious even if you already know what they mean. Rejoice in the fact that someone cared to do this at all.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Rich-Meeting/100003481548303 Rich Meeting

    -””””””””””-welcome– to –””’our singles club

    D_a_t_e___r-i-c-h___P_e_o_p_l_e___H_e_r_e

  • http://datelinenews.org/ Gregory Mendoza

    i love these memes, lessons are being implied in a funny way… life just dont get boring with their existence

  • Fuck Ian C.

    Reddit? 9gag? Your article fails to be accurate. ALL these memes started on 4chan. 9gag, reddit and the fools who post them on facebook are merely stealing the original content posted by the 4chan community. Look up the archives. Many of these memes are years and years old, 4chan has been around for ages. Reddit stole all the creativity in a year.

  • wompwomp

    previous poster is right. these are all from 4chan and some are pretty old. they tend to trickle down to places like 9gag and reddit then facebook but i wouldn’t say that any of them are necessarily creative. captioning any particular image has been done on 4chan dozens of times over. some end up being funny. most of them are shit

  • The Game

    Your memes are bad and you should feel bad!

  • http://twitter.com/JohnnyOldschoo1 Johnny Oldschool

    That Scumbag Stacey meme was made by a woman who pulls that shit all the time.

  • Name

    No, it was a Halloween costume, that they then used as the girl version of Scumbag Steve.

  • http://www.facebook.com/SilverIce64 Tucker Barnes

    The first advice animal was Advice Dog, not ORLY Owl. That’s why they’re called advice animal memes.

  • Optimistic Prime

    Scumbag Author

    Shows a complete lack of understanding about memes
    Goes on to insult the people that use them

  • DaReaperZ

    Well.. this was a heap of fail. “Holy jesus balls… the top line is always a useless exclamation” is only ONE of the things wrong here.. but that one is the worst one I have found so far… wait… almost all of them are wrong! Where the hell did you gather your information from!?

  • Fuck

    …Don’t you people realize that memes are basically for 10 year old retards?
    Everyone acts like these memes are some amazing witty art when they’re stupid.
    “Waaaaa reddit and 9fag stole these pictures with text”.
    That’s like someone stealing dogshit and claiming they made it. You shouldn’t care and those people should be laughed at by default.

  • The Bawmb

    freaking idiot. advice dog was the first advice animal. ffs. O RLY isnt even an advice animal its a reaction face r just an image macro!

  • 16

    You just ruined every meme.

  • Pedobear

    Whoever wrote this is an idiot. . .

  • Zefram Mann

    I wish I could post a “Master of the Obvious” pic for this douchebag author.