meme-review
KYM Review: The Top Viral Videos Of 2024
The threshold for internet virality keeps upping its ante each year, making the candidates in this year's viral video list particular standouts in a sea of content. Each video has its own funny, bizarre or enraging backstory but each clip stands out in how instantly recognizable it is and in terms of the splash it made in the meme economy.
This year's biggest videos came from almost every corner of the internet, from "Gen Z Boss and a Mini" over on "Reels" to "Mama a Girl Behind You" from Snapchat. We even have a rare Zoom origin in the form of "Corey Harris's Suspended License" video making the list in 2024, as well as a certain, unforgettable performance at the 2024 Summer Paris Olympics.
Here's a recap of 2024's biggest viral videos, from standalone hits to clips that inspired massive meme trends.
Four Seasons Orlando Baby
The video of the Four Seasons Orlando Baby is the kind of clip that would have landed the family five consecutive appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show a decade ago.
The eight-second-long video featuring a very articulate baby was recorded by her aunt (TikTok user @sobrizzle), who posted the clip to TikTok back in May. The video shows @sobrizzle asking her two nieces, "Who wants to go to the Four Seasons Orlando?" to which the baby responds "Meee…!" without missing a single beat.
The video exploded onto the internet the week it dropped, racking up more than 20 million views almost instantly. Many people were really taken by how lucid and coherent the baby appeared to be, leading to the first wave of "Four Seasons Orlando Baby" jokes in which people would dub over the footage to make the infant deliver a personal monologue.
There was something really absurd and funny about a bald baby still in diapers somehow being able to offer a cogent response to any question, much less one about where to vacation. After all, it's not like the baby has any choice in the matter.
… or does she? The Four Seasons Orlando baby may not have appeared on Ellen, but she ran the cable news circuit and eventually landed an all-expenses paid trip to the Four Seasons for the whole family. Win!
We're Costco Guys
A.J. and his son Big Justice made We're Costco Guys back in March. The two rudy-faced Italian Americans took turns filming themselves strolling through their local Costco while eating a "chicken bake" and a "double chunk chocolate cookie." It's a concept that sounds innocuous enough until you actually witness the clip firsthand.
There is something very uncanny but ultimately endearing about the doe-eyed pair. There's been a lot of chatter about parents forcing their kids into a social media career in recent years (think Baby Gronk), but going through A.J.'s catalog of TikToks only seems to highlight the bond the father-son pair enjoy.
There's a whole cinematic universe that emerged from this Costco Guys video in 2024, with valuable additions to the team like The Rizzler (Christian Joseph) only serving to further develop their lore and fame — a viral internet presence that ultimately landed them on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon of all places.
Hawk Tuah Girl
The video of Haliey Welch, best known as the "Hawk Tuah Girl," getting street interviewed is arguably the year's biggest viral video. YouTubers Tim & Dee TV posted a street interview back in June, asking a gaggle of young women, "What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?"
Haliey Welch was brave enough to give a cheeky response, saying, "Oh, you gotta give him that hawk tuah and spit on that thang," in the thickest Southern accent possible.
The video marked a remarkable shift in popular internet meme culture in how it germinated in the normie, college-aged male community known as the Zynternet before it began to leak into every corner of the internet. It was an inversion of how internet memes usually travel as in-jokes in niche communities that eventually make their way into your parent's Facebook feed … just six months too late.
It's not an overstatement to say that people went a little nuts about the Hawk Tuah Girl, quoting her now-infamous catchphrase to the moon and back as it even became one of 2024's biggest slang terms. What's interesting is that, despite the largely male leaning of the audience that blew up Welch's video, they all seemed incredibly enthusiastic and supportive of her message.
Welch went on to leverage her initial 15 minutes of fame into her own Talk Tuah podcast, even creating her very own meme coin — although it ultimately ended up becoming one of the biggest crypto scandals of the year.
Mama A Girl Behind You
Although the video was first posted to the internet back in 2018, Mama A Girl Behind You made our viral videos list this year by setting off a meme storm on "FlopTok," a TikTok community frequented by the girls and the gays.
The video shows a woman dressed in a bright yellow outfit posing on her back porch as her son tries to take a photo of her.
For some reason, the camera is set to video on Snapchat, and the woman’s little knee-height Bitmoji confuses her son long enough for him to stammer, "Mummy, Mama a girl behind you." Exasperated, the woman paces back to her kid to inspect the footage.
The mediocre camera quality, the Snapchat banner across the video and the audio of a toddler experiencing possibly his first tech mishap came together to make "Mama a Girl Behind You" a hugely viral video and trend, one that TikTokers were quoting and reposting for weeks on end.
Suspended License Zoom aka Corey Harris Driving
The hilarious video of a Michigan man named Corey Harris video calling into a court hearing about his suspended driving license while still driving a car was possibly one of the funniest standalone viral videos of 2024.
The clip opened with a rather stern-looking judge waiting patiently as Corey Harris tuned into the hearing from his steering wheel and asked for a second to park his car. The judge was left flabbergasted upon learning that Harris was actually in court trying to get his license unsuspended, a task complicated by his decision to flagrantly break the law in front of his own judge.
The video had it all: Judge Simpson's defeated and disbelieving expression upon reading Harris's charges, Harris's lawyer's half-hearted attempt at postponing the hearing and Harris's own confused open-mouthed expression after learning that he won't be driving again anytime soon.
Gen Z Boss and a Mini
Incels on Twitter may have been a whole month late to the Boots and a Slick Back Bun TikTok trend, but that didn't stop them from making the Gen Z Boss and a Mini video posted by the ladies at an Australian skincare brand go viral through sheer hating.
When girls on TikTok kicked off a silly rhyme trend in the summer of 2024 in which they took aspects of their outfits or personalities and turned them into a repetitive song, it only made sense that the corporate girlies would catch on. But what started as an innocent attempt to participate in an internet trend – one several weeks stale at the time – instead ended up inciting the most bizarre backlash over on Twitter / X.
The video wound up being spread around in some pretty conservative internet circles where people shared jokes about how the ladies pictured were actually HR warming up to fire half the building. Still, it seems like the ladies had the last laugh when they posted a follow-up video reading out hate comments completely unbothered.
No Chick-fil-A Sauce?
A clip of a Chick-fil-A employee making a crazy face and repeatedly asking, "So no Chick-fil-A sauce?" dropped in February of this year, prompting another hugely viral video trend. It isn't immediately apparent what's going on in the video — it starts with a blonde fast-food cashier making a truly wacky face when her customer turns down the offer for extra Chick-fil-A sauce.
A rewatch makes it apparent that the cashier and the girl behind the camera are clearly friends and she probably came up to her friend during her shift at the local fast-food place and whipped her phone out, not knowing that her friend had no qualms being goofy af on the clock.
The internet eventually tracked down the No Chick-fil-A Sauce Girl, who made no sustained effort at capitalizing on her fame. Still, animators, meme creators and VFX folks went crazy with the video, recreating it and dubbing it over as an exercise in capturing some truly novel facial expressions.
Raygun
The 36-year-old Australian breakdancer Raygun and her presence at the Summer 2024 Games did not bode well for the newly minted Olympic category. Breakdancing was introduced to the Olympics for the first time this year, with participants getting very excited for a chance to solidify the sport's presence in future events.
Unfortunately, the Olympics breakdancing competition was overshadowed in small part by the internet's reaction to Rachael Gunn, who calls herself "Raygun" on stage.
People were bemused but nevertheless excited about seeing what a woman with a PhD in cultural studies and an academic background in breakdancing could accomplish on the Olympic stage, but a quick look at her performance dashed the Aussie team's hopes of securing any medal (or respect) in the sport this year.
People joked that Raygun's awkward, squirmy and unpolished style of breakdancing was like watching your little cousins perform the one weird trick he spent all day perfecting. Raygun's performance was all over Twitter as one of the last gags to come out of the Paris Olympics before the event wrapped up on August 11th.
You Have Been Promoted! You Are Now One Of My Elite Employees!
Mainly Manny's impeccable drag performance as a boss and CEO spawned a whole TikTok trend back in February. Manny's best known for his uptight "Boss" character where he dresses up in the best navy blue girlboss pantsuit Macy's has to offer and commands his cameraman around. "You Have Been Promoted" was possibly his biggest success as the character.
The clip opens with Manny as the Boss-and-CEO walking up to a grocery store, which he pretends is his office. He turns to the cameraman and informs him that the entire rest of the staff has been laid off, proclaiming, "You have been promoted! You are now one of my elite employees."
The ever-quotable nature of the video inspired scores of memes this spring, with people using the clip of Manny's silly open-mouthed expression to share jokes about their own delusional bosses and workplace woes.
Ultimately, Manny's impeccable accent and on-point comedic timing are what really sell the clip as worthy of being in our top viral videos list. Make sure you check out his other videos too, including the one that seems to have been filmed, inexplicably, on the set of Silent Hill.
Looking for more of this year's best viral phenomena and memes? Be sure to check out our other 2024 meme roundups below: