Avis rent-a-car buttons We Try Harder!
There were no pre-Internet memes? Surely you can’t be serious!
We’re quite serious. And stop calling me Shirley.
The old highway Burma Shave signs.
I remember in an anthropology class I took once, the instructor showed a slide of a stone carving from some time in the Ice Age, which showed a monkey looking behind himself in puzzlement as he shat out an enormously long turd, and there was a bird sitting on the end of the turd looking back at him. According to the instructor, similar carvings had been discovered all over Europe and constitutes the first known widespread “joke.” So maybe the first meme dates back about 11,000 years or so?
Yup.
I get the idea that most folks here don’t quite understand what the term really means. Maybe we need a new term to describe the stuff listed in this thread. Or a new term to mean what “meme” really means.
My favorite memes:
the wheel
agriculture
languages
phonetic alphabets
Leave it to the Internet to change a word’s meaning from a very useful one to a trivial one.
The 30-year-old junior high school students at my last restaurant played this game, and called it “Cheerio”.
Shouting “Where’s the Beef?!”
Would “23 Skidoo” and “So’s your old man!” count?
Maybe “The British are coming” or “Remember the Alamo”?
I always try to use that old saw, “Get the behind me, Satan” whenever it’s appropriate.
The thread about Pismo Beach made me think of this one:
“I knew I shoulda taken that left toin at Albukoyke.” - Bugs Bunny