Pepe the Frog’s True Origin — Meme History
Ever since the popularity of social medias such as twitter and Facebook there has been a huge growth of memes or pictures on the internet that gain many laughs and are spread through word of mouth or in this case spread through tagging your friends.
According to the dictionary, Memes are a humorous picture, video, piece of text, etc. that is copied (with slight variation) and spread rapidly by Internet users.
As a millennial myself, I have seen the the huge popularity of memes on my social media and have also participated in this cultural movement myself. Most of the memes on the internet are used to gain laughter and are usually used to tag friends in order to share the laughter which causes an increase in popularity. Even today, I see memes when I log onto Facebook, Instagram, and occasionally in YouTube videos which shows a huge trend in today’s culture.
Pepe the Frog was originally a character created by an artist named Matt Furie who used this character for his comic series “boy’s club”which stars 4 teenage monsters. Originally the meme started off in a 4chan forum and has widely spread throughout all social medias.
Pepe the Frog is a meme that was created in 2008 that was associated with the “feels good man” reaction image. However, in 2009 an edited version of Pepe the Frog showing his distraught face with a caption “feels bad man” had been circulating the internet and increased the usage of Pepe the frog meme. Now today, Pepe the Frog memes have increased and is used for a variety of things showing with the image of Pepe the Frog edited into different versions and different captions, but still showing the distraught face has become widely spread and popular. Some notable people who have used the Pepe the Frog meme on their social medias include:
Katy Perry:
Nikki Minaj:
Donald Trump:
Wendy:
The Russian Embassy:
One of the main reasons why it became famous was due to the flexibility and variety the meme has to offer as you can see in the above pictures, Pepe the frog was used differently in each meme. It is also famous because it is so universally known that everyone who sees it will understand what kind of meaning the meme was trying to portray.
