There was no single “meme of 2023.” The year’s internet culture moved through TikTok edits, reaction images, fan art, movie mash-ups, AI satire and phrases that escaped their original context. Know Your Meme’s December 2023 user poll offers the clearest audience-based benchmark, while several other entries became major cross-platform trends.
The list below treats “meme” broadly, but distinguishes a reusable meme format from a one-off viral moment or a wider social-media trend. The ordering is editorial rather than an objective ranking.
The 21 memes and formats that defined 2023
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Animan Studios and “Axel in Harlem”
Know Your Meme’s 2023 Meme of the Year, with 11.8% of the votes in its user poll, was the wildly recognizable “Axel in Harlem” edit. The remix paired footage associated with Animan Studios with Mustard and Roddy Ricch’s “Ballin’,” especially the lyric “I put the new Forgis on the Jeep.” Its spread demonstrated how a familiar audio clip could make an obscure or unsuitable source recognizable to millions.
Content note: the original animation is sexually explicit. Many later versions used censored footage, redraws or unrelated fictional characters, which are safer references for general audiences.
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Barbenheimer
On July 21, 2023, Barbie and Oppenheimer opened on the same day. Their radically different tones—hot-pink fantasy comedy and grim nuclear-history drama—created an almost perfect meme pairing. Posts imagined viewers switching between pink outfits and black suits, buying themed snacks, or treating the two films as a single double feature.
Barbenheimer was more than a joke about contrasting posters. It became a participatory cinema event and helped turn a crowded release date into a shared cultural occasion. Know Your Meme’s poll placed it second, with 9% of the vote.
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The Josh Hutcherson “Whistle” fancam
A fan edit featuring Josh Hutcherson and Flo Rida’s “Whistle” had circulated in an older, Tumblr-era style before Hutcherson’s appearance in Five Nights at Freddy’s brought it back into view. In 2023, users inserted the unexpectedly dramatic fancam into videos, screens, appliances and unrelated scenes.
The humor came from timing: a normal clip would suddenly be interrupted by an intensely edited tribute to Hutcherson. It was a classic example of an old internet artifact becoming new again through TikTok’s remix culture.
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Smurf Cat and “We Live, We Love, We Lie”
The blue, cat-headed character known as Smurf Cat or Shailushai spread widely on TikTok alongside Alan Walker’s “The Spectre.” The character had first gained popularity in Russia before reaching a much broader English-language audience. Know Your Meme named it the site’s September 2023 Meme of the Month.
Its appeal was deliberately simple: an instantly identifiable blue figure, a repeated song fragment and captions that could be applied to romance, work, gaming or melodramatic personal struggles.
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Boykisser
Boykisser is a white cat character used in GIF captions, image macros and short edits, often accompanied by teasing lines about liking boys. During 2023, the character became a mascot-like figure in parts of younger LGBTQ+ internet culture, particularly among gay male users.
The format worked because it could be affectionate, knowingly embarrassing or deliberately over-the-top depending on the caption. As with many identity-linked memes, its meaning changed with the community using it.
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Shadow Wizard Money Gang
“Shadow Wizard Money Gang” grew from a producer tag heard in Joeyy’s song “Gout.” The phrase inspired neon wizard illustrations, redraws and posts imagining a secret magical organization devoted to getting money.
The meme’s visual language was unusually consistent: bright colors, fantasy robes and deliberately grand declarations. It turned a short audio tag into a fictional club with its own mythology and membership joke.
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Offensive AI Pixar
AI-generated posters imitating the polished look of Pixar or Disney films became a major format in 2023. The images gave deceptively wholesome titles and family-film designs to shocking events, controversies or offensive jokes. Know Your Meme recognized the trend as its October 2023 Meme of the Month.
The joke depended on the collision between visual innocence and subject matter. It also reflected a growing anxiety about generative AI: the images were funny to some viewers, but their production raised questions about style imitation, attribution and the ease of manufacturing convincing fake media.
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Moushley
Moushley transformed Ashley Graham from Resident Evil 4—including the 2023 remake—into a mouse. Fan artists added cheese puns, tiny versions of Ashley’s clothes and scenarios in which Leon Kennedy had to rescue a small rodent rather than a president’s daughter.
It was a low-stakes character remix with a clear visual premise. Like many successful fan memes, it needed almost no explanation once the name “Moushley” was understood.
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“I Am a Surgeon, Dr. Han!”
A scene from ABC’s The Good Doctor became a reaction format after spreading on TikTok in April 2023. Dr. Shaun Murphy shouts, “I am a surgeon,” while Dr. Han maintains an unmoved expression. The contrast made the clip useful for moments when someone insists on their competence while everyone else remains skeptical.
The format was not entirely new: it had originated on Chinese social media in 2021 before finding a larger English-language audience. Its 2023 revival shows how meme circulation often involves translation, rediscovery and a change of platform.
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The Amazing Digital Circus and Pomni
Gooseworx’s pilot episode of The Amazing Digital Circus premiered on YouTube in October 2023 and quickly generated fan art, edits and reaction images. Much of the attention centered on Pomni, the anxious jester trapped in an unsettling digital world.
Pomni’s panicked expressions made her an adaptable reaction character, while the series’ bright design and existential premise gave artists plenty to reinterpret. The meme life of the show began almost immediately after the pilot’s release.
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The Japanese McDonald’s family advertisement
A Japanese McDonald’s advertisement showing a family eating together became an international source of fan art and redraws. The animated-style image was not created as an internet meme; its meme status emerged when audiences outside its intended market adopted the composition and characters.
Many responses focused on its warmth rather than mockery. Artists redrew the family with different characters, franchises and personal touches, turning a commercial image into a template for wholesome reinterpretation.
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Pizza Tower and Peppino
Pizza Tower’s frantic chef, Peppino Spaghetti, appeared throughout 2023 in fan art, animations, reaction images and slang-heavy edits. His exaggerated expressions and frantic movement made him especially effective as a visual shorthand for panic, rage or sudden momentum.
The game’s bold, cartoonish animation style also made Peppino easy to recognize when removed from the game. Memes helped the indie platformer reach audiences who might never have encountered it through conventional game coverage.
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Napoleon’s “There’s Nothing We Can Do”
“There’s Nothing We Can Do” became a defeatist caption and reaction format associated with Napoleon. Users applied it to failed plans, worsening news and situations that appeared impossible to reverse.
The phrase is intentionally flat. Rather than offering an elaborate punchline, it supplies a resigned response to the inevitability of disaster—one of the most durable forms of online humor.
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Rizz and the “Rizz God”
“Rizz,” a shortening of “charisma,” was one of 2023’s dominant pieces of internet slang. It was strongly associated with streamer Kai Cenat and became so widespread that Oxford Languages selected it as its 2023 Word of the Year.
The term could describe genuine charm, successful flirting or the complete absence of either. “Rizz God” pushed the expression into mock-grandiose territory, presenting ordinary social confidence as a supernatural ability.
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Dracula Flow
Dracula Flow consisted of dark, boastful freestyle videos performed through a vampire-themed persona. The dramatic delivery and exaggerated lines were clipped, quoted and remixed throughout 2023.
The videos were memorable because they treated ordinary bragging like gothic prophecy. Every statement sounded larger, colder and more theatrical than the situation required, which made individual lines easy to reuse.
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“One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy”
The phrase references Albert Camus’s famous discussion of Sisyphus, the figure condemned to push a boulder uphill for eternity. In 2023, it became a caption for everything from tedious work to absurd optimism and knowingly depressing life situations.
Its flexibility came from the ambiguity of the word “happy.” A post could use the phrase sincerely, ironically or as a bleak acknowledgement that the task would simply have to be repeated.
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TMFINR and Tiffany Gomas
TMFINR stands for “that motherfucker is not real,” taken from Tiffany Gomas’s viral July 2023 airplane outburst. The phrase became a shorthand for suspicion, disbelief and the conviction that something—or someone—was not what it appeared to be.
Her surname is Gomas, not Gomez or Gomes. The correction matters because contemporary meme coverage frequently repeated those misspellings.
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Smirking Kevin James
A still image of Kevin James with his hands in his pockets and a smirk became a reaction template in September 2023. Captions generally implied guilt, awkward satisfaction or the performance of innocence after doing something questionable.
The image was effective because the expression could support several readings. The same smirk might mean “I got away with it,” “I have no idea what you mean” or “this situation is about to become uncomfortable.”
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M3GAN dance memes
The title character from the horror-comedy M3GAN became a meme before and after the film’s January 6, 2023 release. Her robotic dance, deadpan insults and unnervingly controlled movements were clipped, recreated and placed into new contexts.
The dance was especially shareable because it combined horror with performance. M3GAN looked both technically precise and socially inappropriate, a combination that translated easily into short-form video.
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The Grimace Shake
McDonald’s Grimace birthday shake became the basis for a TikTok horror parody. Creators pretended to drink the purple shake, wished Grimace a happy birthday and then cut to grotesque fictional aftermaths, often involving blood, injuries or supernatural scenes.
This was not an official McDonald’s challenge. It was a user-created format that borrowed the visual identity of a brand and turned a cheerful product promotion into mock horror. Its success came from a repeatable structure: introduction, sip, abrupt transformation.
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Pedro Pascal eating a sandwich
A clip of Pedro Pascal eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich originated in a March 1, 2023 LADbible Snack Wars video. A March 7 edit helped turn the footage into a TikTok meme, and the clip later circulated through a CapCut template.
Pascal’s increasingly emotional expression while eating made the footage useful for captions about exhaustion, grief, relief or barely holding oneself together. The mundane action became funny because viewers supplied an entirely different emotional story.
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What counted as a meme in 2023?
Several major 2023 internet phenomena do not fit the narrow definition of a meme template. “Girl dinner,” “girl math,” the Roman Empire question, “seemingly ranch” and Spotify Wrapped were influential social-media formats or recurring conversations rather than one specific image or video that users repeatedly captioned.
That distinction is useful. A meme can be a reusable picture, sound, phrase, character or editing structure. A trend may instead be a topic, behavior or platform-wide ritual. Both can dominate online attention, but they spread differently and leave different cultural traces.
Why these memes spread
| Mechanism | Examples | Why it worked |
|---|---|---|
| Remixable audio | “Ballin’,” “Whistle,” “The Spectre,” Dracula Flow | A sound could be detached from its source and applied to almost any video. |
| Instant visual recognition | Smurf Cat, Pomni, M3GAN, Kevin James | A distinctive face or silhouette communicated the joke before the caption was read. |
| Strong cultural contrast | Barbenheimer, Grimace Shake, Offensive AI Pixar | The humor came from placing incompatible tones, genres or contexts together. |
| Simple caption logic | “There’s Nothing We Can Do,” “One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy,” TMFINR | A short phrase could describe countless personal or news-related situations. |
| Fan participation | Moushley, Peppino, McDonald’s family ad, Pomni | Artists and editors could extend the joke instead of merely reposting it. |
Across the list, the most durable formats were not necessarily the most polished. They gave people a recognizable starting point and enough room to add their own context. That combination—familiarity plus flexibility—is what allowed a clip, character or phrase to travel across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X and fan communities.
Source note: The ranking benchmark is Know Your Meme’s December 18, 2023 user poll. Additional context comes from Know Your Meme, Vogue and Esquire. “Best” remains an editorial judgment, not a universal measurement.
FAQ
What was the most popular meme of 2023?
Know Your Meme’s December 2023 user poll named Animan Studios, commonly known through the “Axel in Harlem” edit, its 2023 Meme of the Year. It received 11.8% of the vote.
Was Barbenheimer a meme or a trend?
It was both a meme and a wider cultural event. The pink-versus-black jokes, double-feature posts and film mash-ups were meme formats, while seeing both movies on July 21, 2023 became a broader audience trend.
Was the Grimace Shake challenge official?
No. The grotesque videos were a user-created TikTok horror parody inspired by McDonald’s birthday promotion, not an official McDonald’s challenge.
What does TMFINR mean?
TMFINR means “that motherfucker is not real.” It came from Tiffany Gomas’s viral July 2023 airplane outburst and became a caption for suspicion or disbelief.
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The Bottom Line
The defining memes of 2023 were less about one universal joke than about rapid reuse. A song, reaction image, cartoon character or advertising frame could be detached from its original setting and rebuilt by millions of users. That constant remixing—sometimes wholesome, sometimes surreal and sometimes deliberately offensive—is the clearest record of how internet culture moved through the year.
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