The Top 25 Greatest Internet Memes of 2010

This is by far the most recognizable, memorable and epic internet meme of 2010.

By now, most people know the original story. Strangely enough, the most popular internet meme, where originally people poked fun at an actual hero on the news who just happened to be very colorful in the way he speaks, came from a story that is usually no laughing matter: rape. The story goes that Antoine Dodson's sister was almost raped in their apartment by a man who climbed in the window, took his shirt off (WTF???), then climbed into bed with her. When Antoine heard the intruder he ran into her room and chased him away. ( Click here ) for the original news report.

This news report spawned many a meme, including t-shirts, parody videos, and of course, an auto-tune remix (most notably, the one embedded here and the one that everyone has heard, which was written by Auto Tune the News.) The auto-tuned song was so catchy and so popular it was brought onto iTunes. And the proceeds from iTunes were, according to this CBS interview , enough to get Antoine Dodson out of the ghetto and into a better neighborhood where he'd never have to worry about his sister almost getting raped again.

( Source )

The World Cup: one of the most watched sporting events in all of human history. Known for bringing together nation upon nation for a "glorious celebration of the world" month.

The 2010 World Cup was also full of firsts. The first time the World Cup was held in Africa. The first time Spain won the World Cup title. The first time Lionel Messi disappointed the World. And the first time the World Cup made the entire world hate part of the culture of the home country; in this case: the Vuvuzela.

The Vuvuzela, in case you didn't watch the World Cup and were under a rock (in which case, I saw 127 hours and you're a very brave person and a hero to all of us), is the buzzing sound that makes it feel like the soccer players were about to get attacked by a swarm of bees throughout every game. No, it wasn't a Beepocalypse, it was hundreds (thousands?) of people blowing into plastic instruments native to South Africa that are customarily blown during soccer matches. Sure, they were a rich part of a culture, but they were annoying as all hell and not only did the world know it, the internet took hold of it, and made fun of it immediately, hilariously and relentlessly.

Just watch this Fellowship of the Ring parody to understand the kind of jokes that came out of this whole ordeal.

Even major news publications immediately picked up on this soul-crushing phenomenon, including the BBC , Time magazine , and The New York Times even wrote stories about the damned things.

There was no escape. So the meme became that people would really embrace the Vuvuzelas, like in this great video game idea below, or like in the embedded video, where Vuvuzelas would just interrupt something really, really important, and after a while, just anything at all.

Great videos and pictures made by perpetuators of this meme:

Play Vuvuzela hero!

Hitler struggles to be heard.

Classic SNL skit remake.

At 1:16, a voice asks "what does this mean?"

That's what we are all asking ourselves about this video to this day. Showcasing a "double rainbow" in this guy's backyard, we subsequently see the guy's voice go from awe and shock to tearful or orgasmic glee.

Thanks to Jimmy Kimmel tweeting this video, the meme spread like wildfire, entertaining and puzzling the rest of the country. Kimmel even invited Double Rainbow guy to his show . We still don't know if the guy was on drugs or not, since he denies it and says "the Spirit of the Universe" took over him instead, which is understandable since the guy seems like enough of a hippie to believe in the healing power of crystals.

We even got a song out of it from the Internet Meme masters Auto-Tune the News: click here for Double Rainbow autotuned. This song will be stuck in your head forever.

Needless to say, the references drowned message boards and continue to be made to this very day. How popular was this meme? Well, much like the biggest ones here, it got its own Halloween costume.

Click here for the Double Rainbow Halloween costume, posted by Nerve.com .

At first, this was an item about just Strutting Leo. Thanks to the people over at Gorillamask , we were reminded that the Inception Mash-Ups meme not only belongs on this list, that it's one of the greatest of the year. This meme had multiple applications, not just Strutting Leo (see the section for that below.)

THE MASH-UPS
With a film as serious, as unique and as revolutionary as Christopher Nolan's Inception (Summer, 2010), you really can't help but make jokes about it. Whenever anything takes itself so seriously, it also kind of deserves to be made fun of. It was easily one of the best films of 2010, and the internet attention it got was deserved.

The theme to Inception became iconic so quickly because of its blaring, repetitive, gut-wrenching horns near the end of the trailer. The song is so intense and the horns so brilliantly timed, that people started making mash-ups of the trailer's audio with other things. The embedded video is an amazing example of how it was done with various animals.

There was also Inception Cat (a cat who peeks out from behind a door so slowly that it matches up perfectly to the swelling Inception theme.) See it here .

Also, showing that the Inception theme can make anything intense, someone made one of the best movie mash-ups of all time when they put the Inception theme to scenes from Dumb and Dumber .

INCEPTION COMICS
On top of this, people made an image macro out of the scene in Inception where Leo deceives Cillian Murphy's character. Check out all the image memes and some of the video ones here (thanks again to Gorillamask .)

STRUTTING LEO:
What do you get when you wake up in limbo after dying from trying to fight off the target's subconscious projections in a dream within a dream?

Why, you see Leo strutting with Jesus, of course. There's no better Heaven than that.

This meme came from a set picture of Leonardo Di Caprio while he was filming Christopher Nolan's Inception. Here is the photo.

Basically, Leo looked so unbelievably happy doing whatever he was doing (strutting, apparently) that the internet saw it and, almost opposite of Sad Keanu, took to it and used it everywhere. His picture is used sarcastically more often than not, having Leo casually strutting away from explosions or horrible moments in human history.

Here are a few:

Strutting Leo rocking it out with JFK's motorcade the day JFK died.

About to own the 100 meter track race.

Playing Where's Waldo? in this Band of Brothers promotional poster.

Axing the Shining twins.

Marching out with Hitler.

Blowing your mind in The Matrix.

Strutting Leo basically doesn't give what you have to say, he's going to strut and it doesn't matter where he is, much like the "haters gonna hate" meme.