The Rise of the Meme

Have you seen the video of Pedro Pascal eating a sandwich? In a clip that became wildly popular earlier this year, the Mandalorian star bites into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and chews silently, staring into space.

The clip comes from Pascal’s appearance on a food show, but it quickly became a meme—a piece of digital content that is copied, tweaked, and shared online. People have added sad piano music, loud crunching sounds, dancing cats, and funny captions. Versions of the meme have been viewed millions of times.

Funny, right? Of course.

But memes can do a lot more than make us laugh. Memes offer us a way to connect with each other, to express ourselves, to be creative and clever. Indeed, memes have become an important form of communication.

Memes may seem like a new phenomenon, but they’ve existed in various forms for thousands of years. The term meme can refer to any idea or behavior that is passed from person to person. A scientist named Richard Dawkins is credited with coining the term in 1976—decades before smartphones and the internet became part of our everyday lives.

Dawkins noted that as memes spread, they take on new meanings. Here’s an example: In the lead-up to World War II, the British government designed a motivational poster that read “Keep Calm and Carry On.” The message was meant to ease people’s fears during a frightening time.

In 2000, the poster resurfaced and became trendy. People began putting lighthearted spins on the original wording, like “Keep Calm and Eat Tacos” and “Keep Calm and Game On.” Countless takes appeared, on everything from T-shirts to mugs to greeting cards.

The 1939 poster had become a meme.

Memes as we know them now emerged in the early 2000s with the rise of the internet. Back then, uploading and editing photos took time, so early memes were pretty basic. One of the most iconic was a picture of a fluffy cat with a caption that read: “I Can Has Cheezburger?” After it was posted online in 2007, thousands of people created their own silly cat memes, now known collectively as LOLCats.

These days, memes are much easier to make. Digital tools allow you to riff on existing memes or to create entirely new ones with just a few clicks or taps. Today, more than one million memes are shared every day on Instagram alone.

But the ease of meme-making isn’t the only reason memes are everywhere. It’s also because they’re a great way to communicate, says Will Styler, a linguist at the University of California, San Diego.

Memes have the power to capture a moment, an attitude, or a feeling in a way that anyone can understand. Creating and sharing them can make stressful situations easier to handle—even funny—and make you feel less alone.

“Oftentimes we use memes to express things that are too complicated to express through words,” Styler says.