While memes are very popular they aren’t the most popular things on the Internet. According to Goodle Trends pizza is still a more popular search word than memes. But how could anything beat pizza, right?
The word “meme” was created in 1976. Yes, we are stunned too! That was almost twenty years before the Internet was born in 1991. It all started with a biologist named Richard Dawkins who wrote a book called The Selfish Gene, where he refers to something called “a unit of cultural transmission”.
He proposed an idea that ideas were like organisms and these ideas were the basis for human culture and they all started in our brain.
So now fast-forward to 2019 were memes are a part of our daily Internet interactions.
According to a study done at Statista, millennials spend over 200 minutes on the web every single day. Just imagine 200 minutes spent viewing memes, sounds great right?
Well we are going to dive right in to one of the most viral memes ever! We all have seen it. It’s the overly attached girlfriend meme. It all started when Laina Morris also known as Youtuber wzr0713, uploaded a webcam video, “JB Fanvideo”. Morris performed a parody of Justin Bieber’s song “Boyfriend”. It was in response to Bieber’s online sing-off contest, which he did to promote his new perfume at the time.
Her parody video used very clingy lyrics and from her facial reaction on camera a little bit like a stalker.
Within hours of hitting the web, the video received over 1.35 million views and now has over 19 million views.
On June 7th, Redditor yeahhtoast submitted a link to the video in a thread, “Overly Attached Girlfriend”.
There were over 800 comments in the span of a few hours. Two weeks later the hype only grew when fans realized she had a Facebook profile open and Twitter. From then circulation of her picture from the video with words over it implying that she is a clingy girlfriend can be found all over the Internet.
This has even taken a turn we never would have expected. “Overly Attached Boyfriend” which is a picture of man who is creepily looking at the camera started circulating around. This was posted to the thread with the same name as the photo and it blew up.
Overly Attached Girlfriend meme is very relatable and let’s be honest we all think it’s funny. It did so well because we can all say we have been jealous about something at some point in our lives, be it as a girlfriend or boyfriend or even just a friend.
And to this day we can look at the overly attached girlfriend and still get a laugh.