Spongebob memes: Spongebob mocking, Spongebob Caveman, and more Internet rule culture

The 20th anniversary of SpongeBob SquarePants, the unlikely Nickelodeon cartoon that has become a cultural phenomenon is still topical – on your TV screen and on the Internet, where it has engendered a thriving culture. In fact, SpongeBob memes have become so iconic that to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the series, Nickelodeon recently announced the release of a range of SpongeBob toys.

Describe yourself: a child's drawing on a talking sea sponge and his underwater friends gave birth to so many known Internet memes that the franchise turns these memes into toys for profit. The SpongeBob Mocking Memes, SpongeBob Imagination, Surprised Patrick, SpongeGar, and Handsome Squidward have become so recognizable to at least some of the audience that Nickelodeon sells them as figurines at around $ 22 each.

Nickelodeon

How did we come here? In honor of two decades of a show whose cultural cachet only seems to grow, let's look at the story, charm and appeal of the best SpongeBob memes on the Internet.

SpongeBob memes have become an Internet subculture in and of themselves

It's hard to overestimate how much popularity SpongeBob SquarePants the memes are. On Reddit, r / BikiniBottomTwitter – which exists primarily to allow users to view the same on Twitter and share them on Reddit – has more than 1.7 million subscribers, making it one of the most popular subreddits of the site. (In comparison, Spongebob's more general subfolder has only 74,000 subscribers.) And SpongeBob memes do not show up and then appear and die; As noted by Digg's editors in the SpongeBob retrospective of the 2018 site, the biggest SpongeBob memes "are all meme superhits. There are no deep cuts here.

Why are SpongeBob memes exactly what makes them so long lasting and enjoyable? On the one hand, the elasticity of the characters in the series makes them unforgettable. The fact that they are animated sea creatures means that they can be visually pleasantly strange, in a way that corresponds to the whimsical, absurd and sometimes somber humor of the Internet.

Nickelodeon via Know Your Meme

Moreover, since SpongeBob SquarePants is above all a cartoon for children, the artistic talent of the series can often become surreal and fantastic without offending its target audience. For example, this is a show that takes place entirely under water, but involves a lot of fire. He never has to explain why or how his main character has arms and legs and wears trousers (square). That's how things are in the town of Bikini Bottom, where SpongeBob, his best friend Patrick the Starfish, and the rest of the characters live.

The people who create a lot of today's Internet culture are people who grew up with SpongeBob SquarePants

SpongeBob memes have existed in one form or another for most of the 21st century, probably because many Millennium and Generation Z meme makers have grown up with Bob sponge and naturally included them in their same speech from the jump, when they started on the "ground". (In a strange generational overlap, you are the man now, which is one of the oldest sites of the same founders of the Internet., Also spawned one of the first moments of the viral SpongeBob meme: the 2006 meme of YTMND "CHOCOLATE !!!!!!!!!")

Several early memes of SpongeBob first circulated more or less in the form of Internet jokes, as the forum custom of answering "No, it's Patrick!" Or the fun quirky of YouTube with the spectacular filming from Squidward's Handsome (a typical squid once memorable show with a temporary physical upgrade) to a wide range of music, a trend that culminated towards 2013 but is close to our hearts – as evidenced by the all-new handsome Squidward action figure .

Another reason why SpongeBob members have been so culturally powerful is that they do not need to be tweaked to apply in all situations. Take, for example, one of the most popular SpongeBob memes, which comes more or less directly from the show itself, via this fun song called "F.U.N. Song":

The simplicity and purity of this song – "F is for friends doing stuff together!" Are immediately mined in the song itself when Sheldon (a naughty plankton who owns one of two fast food establishments Bikini Bottom rivals, Chum Bucket) subvert it by replacing "F is for friends" by "F is for the fire that burns the whole city!" and so on. The process by which the song becomes a meme is integrated with the song itself. The Internet has the courage to go even further.

Apart from the recurring forums and riffs on YouTube, it took SpongeBob members some time to completely saturate broader social media and trigger our collective awareness. The emergence of the "same SpongeBob" as a unique element within cultural awareness really seems to have taken off on Twitter and other social media platforms over the past four years or so – pretty much By the time users of Tumblr started using the show an accessory for sneaky and conscientious comments on the propensity of Tumblr culture to turn everything into a heated academic debate. The aforementioned BikiniBottomTwitter subreddit, for example, was only created in 2016, and the timeline of recent Digg members selects 2015 as a starting point.

Nevertheless, SpongeBob's memes have come a long way and have now clearly taken on their cultural meaning.

Spongebob memes have miraculously kept their "dank meme" credo while becoming more and more healthy and traditional

Given the ease Bob spongeThe characters and stories seem to fit into the Internet culture, it is really remarkable that the memes of SpongeBob have also remained essentially healthy. Unlike the unfortunate fate of Pepe the Frog, SpongeBob and his friends do not yet have the same, but fall essentially into the wrong hands and are used to promote extremist ideologies online. Essentially, the SpongeBob audience fully understood the benevolent and compbadionate values ​​of the show and its late creator, marine biologist and animator Stephen Hillenburg.

This does not mean that SpongeBob memes have never been politicized. Some have even become a basic element of the progressive protests of the Trump era:

Mocking Spongebob's meme, in particular, which is perhaps the best-known of the show, has been used frequently on social media since its appearance in 2017 as a tool to denounce political absurdities. Based on a screen capture taken from the episode of the new season of SpongeBob SquarePants titled "Little Yellow Book", the meme Mocking SpongeBob turned SpongeBob's normally bbad character into an angry speaker figure (imitating a hen, no less) who seemed to be scolding and / or to make fun of something invisible. Something invisible quickly became what the Internet wanted, but he was very often accused of political comment.

Helped by the magic touch of a boringly annoying text, meant to represent a mocking voice mistrustfully repeating everything you say, but more disdainfully, the meme has become a huge viral phenomenon.

Today, it is often presented without any of the original signifiers, with the exception of the typing style. It is now accepted that when you write a phrase alternating lowercase / lowercase, you are referring to that same element and making fun of an idea / thing / person. There is even an application SpOnGeBoB mOcKiNg that allows you to type automatically, because it is tedious to do it manually!

In particular, while the growth of the healthy meme continues, SpongeBob SquarePants seems ready to play an interesting role in the future of Internet culture. Spongebob memes usually come from the sharpest and most specialized corners of the Internet, but many of the most popular SpongeBob memes, especially in recent years, are definitely soft and fun rather than nihilistic or highly absurd. Tired SpongeBob is a perfect example – The joke is on the surface and ready to laugh at:

Even intentionally "dark" SpongeBob memes, like Savage Patrick, are hilarious because they are malicious, an ordinary level of "evil" everyday:

This does not mean that there are not yet more tricky iterations of SpongeBob memes to find regularly. This week, in fact, r / dankmemes' "1 st still member" is an extremely irreverent joke about the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral that tells the riff "F is for Fire" from "The F.U.N. song. But for the memes, let's face it: things could be much worse. Instead of creating a toxic fandom whose memes fuel even more toxicity, SpongeBob SquarePants rather, it has given rise to something entertaining and fascinating: a whole Internet subculture mainly – dare we say it? – FUN.