Charlie Gardner

Opinion Editor

avg6206@psu.edu

It is no secret that memes are a huge part of pop culture, and I love memes and pop culture. Here is just a small list and short recap of the top memes that came out of the year 2023.

Josh Hutcherson “Whistle” Edit

Of course, I had to mention the edit that has been taking over TikTok the past few months. A random edit of Josh Hutcherson that was made in the early 2010s resurfaced and has taken the internet by storm. It mainly uses a random (and extremely saturated) picture of Hutcherson with the song “Whistle” by Flo Rida accompanying it. It is basically seen as the new Rick Roll. It is extremely random and it came out of nowhere, but those are usually the best memes.

Barbenheimer

The weekend in July where “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were being released on the same day, people were ecstatic. These two movies have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but they were connected solely for their shared release date. I loved it, to be honest. And the edits that came from it were fire.

Grimace

During the summer of 2023, McDonalds came out with a purple Grimace shake to celebrate the character’s birthday. People went absolutely crazy for it and were posting videos on TikTok of them doing weird stuff after drinking the shake. Do not ask questions, I have no idea what started this. And there were other people getting sad about how it was something to celebrate Grimace’s birthday and people were making fun of his birthday shake. The discourse that this caused was surely something else.

Girl Dinner

“Girl dinner” is basically just girls exposing themselves for the weird food combinations they eat. I loved when the trend was first getting popular and seeing all of the concoctions people were coming up with. You could eat an ice cream sandwich and a pickle for dinner and that would be “girl dinner.”

Kevin James

A random photo of Kevin James from when he was on the TV show, “King of Queens,” resurfaced and people started using it as a meme and reaction photo. It is just so out of context and some of the memes that use it are hilarious.

Skibidi Toilet

I am not even going to talk about this one… it is for sure cursed.