This week’s meme is U Mad

The Back Story: During an appearance on the Bill O’Reilly Show in November of 2003, Harlem-based rapper Cam’Ron uttered the phrase in a heated exchange with O’Reily.
(6:00 for the money shot)

In the context of hip hop music, “You mad, ‘cause [I’m better than you]” is a dissing technique that has its roots in freestyle battling and can be often heard in popular rap lyrics, especially on diss tracks.
The catchphrase has morphed and netizens began using it in discussion forums and comment threads to imply that someone (usually the previous poster) is losing their temper during the course of an argument. It’s a form of debate tactic that casually dismisses someone’s counterargument, thus further feeding the rage fuel upon the receiving end. Due to the incendiary nature of the phrase, it is also considered a form of trolling. This is sometimes countered by the sub-meme of I Ain’t Even Mad as a response.

The setup: Using an image ad the U Mad text

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This week’s meme is Epic Boobs Girl (Epic Boobs)

The Back Story: Epic Boobs have been around since the beginning of human existence but the Epic Boobs Girl did not become a meme until around mid 2006. A young girl named Alix in the UK uploaded some racy pictures onto her bebo account and from there one was picked up and turned into the now famous motivational image. After the image began circulating, a search began for who this mysterious girl was. More pictures of her started to leak out from her myspace profile and a few other sources. She became so popular that Loaded magazine published an article under the headline “Wanted! The epic boobs girl!” and offered a £500 for assistance in encouraging her to pose for the magazine. This led to Alix filing suit against the magazine for for violation of her privacy. The complaint was rejected by the Press Complaints Commission citing that since the magazine was not the first to pull the photos, and since it had such wide spread circulation on the net, they were not responsible. The commission didn’t think it possible to censure the magazine for commenting on material that had already had such wide circulation, and which had already been contextualised in the same way (ie, as an exemplar of beautiful breasts) by many others. So Alix lost the case but managed to get a good bump and resurgence in popularity because of it. Many of the Epic Boobs photos in circulation still depict Alix but there have been many others created using different models as the focus.

The set up: Busty pictures set in a motivational photo

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This week’s meme is Hell Yeah Jesus (AKA Respawn Jesus)

The Back Story: Based off a simple image macro like Crazy Dad and many others, the meme features an image macro with text added to it. The image is an old painting depicting Jesus coming out of the cave 3 days after he died. The meme became popular on internet video game forums when discussing the lag of the server and how long it took to respawn your character. From there it grew to general use of Jesus saying different things relating to the scene depicted or to general awesomeness the creator felt he possessed.

The set up: Using the image macro, add your text of what Jesus is saying

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This week’s meme is Cigar Guy

The Back Story: In October at the 2010 Ryder Cup, Daily Mail photographer Mark Pain snapped an awesome shot of Tiger Woods nailing a golf ball right towards the camera. The image looks almost too perfect to be an event photo and at first many thought it was a publicity shot:

As the photo circulated one thing stood out, the gentleman on the right hand side with the cigar. He looked so out of place it was comical. And that ladies and gentleman is how memes are born. Pretty soon Photoshops of the image were popping up on forums all over the net. One thing that fueled the meme was the mystery of who the man was. The Daily Mail tracked him down and found his name was Rupesh Shingadia, a 30-year-old investment analyst. When asked about the getup (the wig, cigar, and fake mustache) he said it was a tribute to Spanish golfer Miguel Angel Jimenez.

The set up: Photoshop Cigar Guy into any picture

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This week’s meme is Domo Kun

The Back Story: Domo is a classic example of a meme turned mainstream. Domo Kun is the official mascot of Japan’s NHK television station who began appearing in stop motion animations used for station identifications around 1998. He had some popularity in Japan for many years but did not get recognized in the U.S. until a Photoshop contest on Fark.com in 2002. The theme of the contest was “Photoshop a porn addiction “Get Well” card” in which one of the users came up with this PSA announcement:

From there Domo took off and the PSA image spread across the net with huge popularity. NHK stopped using Domo in 2004 and it’s likeness and name were picked up by Nickelodeon in 2006. Nick planned a series around Domo with a release in 2008. This was fueled by Target Stores using Domo for their signs in the fall of 2008 along with merchandising and even 7-Eleven jumping on the band waggon with Domo Kun collector cups and other merchandise. Another market that wanted to cash in on this was the Video game market. To date, Domo has 5 video games on the DSIware on the DSI Shop application for the Nintendo DSi.
So this meme has gone full life cycle. From an animated creature for a local news station, to an internet masturbatory joke, to stuffed animals and an image children wear on their clothing.

The set up: Domo is taking over!

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