This Week In Meme History: November 2015

The year 2015 was a different time. Barack Obama was President, TikTok was a 2009 Kesha song played at middle school dances and Harambe the Gorilla was still frolicking in joyous obscurity at the Cincinnati Zoo.

If you were to time travel back exactly seven years to the first week of November in 2015, there are likely things that would be more fun and useful to do than look at memes. You could, for example, use your knowledge of future events to make money betting on sports or the stock market. Perhaps you might want to go correct your personal past mistakes, prevent COVID-19, etc. But odds are, at some point you'd look at memes.

Here are a few of the things you might discover on the circa November 2015 scroll.

Kyle

November 3rd, 2015 is the birthday of Karen's son Kyle, the internet's representative of white boy masculinity, Monster energy drinks and punching drywall.

Stemming from a Vine by Nick Colleti titled "White Boy Fight," which earned over half a million likes and could have shown up on your scroll, this now-iconic name was first coined and attributed to stereotypes all around the web.

Kyle memes blossomed from there into a rich tradition, placing the Kyle character in new situations. But he always remained true to his essential form first spotted in 2015: loud, Caucasian and aggressive.

Would You Fuck a Clone of Yourself?

The peak of BuzzFeed's cultural influence and power was probably sometime around 2015. The site not only set the tone and pace of all clickbait online, but it also began doing real impactful journalism, as well as giving us the Try Guys.

On November 4th, 2015, BuzzFeed published a particularly unhinged (even for BuzzFeed) article called "Can We Ask You A Really Weird Question?" It took the form of a quiz with two questions. The first question asked if a reader Would You Fuck a Clone of Yourself?

The second asked readers to select their "strongest feeling about clone-fucking." The variety of responses to this second question then went on to inspire a classic series of memes.

Over the last seven years, more than 270,000 people have voted on the first question in the poll. "No" has won out, 55 to 45 percent, perhaps surprisingly to some.

Distracted Boyfriend

Perhaps the most famous object-labeling meme, this format didn't explode onto the internet scene until the summer of 2017, but if you were on stock photo databases in November 2015, you might have stumbled across the work of Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem, who posted the photo that later became an iconic meme on November 2nd.

Stock photos are a frequent source of memes, as they often show everyday situations in an oddly bizarre and generic light. The series of photos which later became Distracted Boyfriend is no exception. In the full sequence, even more wacky stuff happens to the Distracted Boyfriend, his girlfriend and the woman in the red dress that he ogles.

But it is one specific moment in the arc that arguably captured the hearts and minds of posters everywhere.

The World of 2015

The social media world of 2015 was truly very different than the one that exists today. Not only was Vine still a thing (if Elon Musk gets his way, it may be a thing again) but the way memes moved between social media platforms was structurally different.

As our meme origins report showed (see chart below), sites like 4chan and Tumblr were much more central to meme origins in 2015 than they are today.

Based on our research, the mid-2010s are the period of meme history where the influence of the platforms appears the most balanced: Twitter is number one, but the others aren't too far behind.

Stay tuned for more weekly internet culture reflections as we continue this series and take a look back on memes from yesteryear next week.