By 
Farewell, 2023. Your memes are now consigned to the great digital dustbin in the cloud. It’s 2024, and the market has changed completely. Memes futures trading is very, very hot and there are a few areas where far-sighted investors will likely find healthy returns this year.
The obvious play is to pile everything you have into general election memes, with the smart money likely paying dividends by late spring or early summer. Come November that'll be compounded by the American election. Obviously it'll be a bull market, and a bit frightening that we'll probably have to wade through loads of AI-faked clips of Rachel Reeves slagging off urchins or whatever, but there will at least be some mildly amusing stuff around to take the edge off. The sight of a minor cabinet minister being sacked while surrounded by trestle tables in a secondary school sports hall is one of democracy's most moving sights.
And there's the one-two of Euro 2024 and the Olympics in Paris, which will no doubt provide their usual mixture of superhuman feats of strength and speed, emotional rollercoasters, and an unfortunate screenshot of Harry Maguire.
A few old favourites will continue to pay dividends. Elon Musk will continue to be the man who spent the most money of any human being who ever lived just to find out that a lot of people think he’s a wanker. We’ll see how that one plays out.
But while we wait for the first few waves of mad nonsense of the year to break, let’s also enjoy the best of 2023’s funny stuff one more time. It’s just like being at a Peter Kay gig, but you can actually see this before the end of 2025. D’you remember Barbenheimer? Eh? Barb? Enheimer?? What were all tharrabout??
Madame Web
The Sony Spider-Man Universe is on perhaps its hottest streak ever. Forget Richard Linklater's Before... films. The Three Colours trilogy is left in the mud. The SSU's one-two punch of Morbius and Madame Web has put it clear. This February the whole world got Webbed.
It all started late last year when the trailer dropped, and with it Johnson's reading of the immortal line: "He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died." You can imagine Aaron Sorkin hearing that line and throwing down his eagle-feather quill in frustration, knowing that he could never touch its elegance.
And when Madame Web itself unspooled its silvery threads from its arse [SUBS CHECK THIS IS HOW SPIDERS WORK] and landed in cinemas, it took the world by storm.
Well, kind of. The Morbius memes were, it turned out, just an overture for Madame Web. It was bad. It was really, really bad. It did not look like a film which had had a reported $100 million spent on it. It frequently didn't even sound like a film which had been approved for release. Dakota Johnson, its star, quickly started saying it was "definitely an experience" and talking about how she didn't want to do anything like it again.
"Sometimes in this industry, you sign on to something, and it’s one thing and then as you’re making it, it becomes a completely different thing, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’" she told Bustle. "But it was a real learning experience, and of course it’s not nice to be a part of something that’s ripped to shreds, but I can’t say that I don’t understand."
It had only been out about three weeks at that point. Just to add to the sense of meltdown, that spiders in the Amazon line got cut from the actual film itself.
But: the memes.
The Glasgow Willy Wonka experience
There's nothing like a deeply underwhelming consumer experience to bring people together. And really, there's been nothing in the world of deeply underwhelming consumer experiences like Willy's Chocolate Experience in Glasgow.
So Willy's Chocolate Experience – which, you'll note, did not use the word 'Wonka' anywhere because that's a copyright firestorm waiting to happen – opened in late February, promising "stunning and intricately designed settings inspired by Roald Dahl's timeless tale". There should have been alarm bells ringing for anyone looking at the website before spending £35 on a ticket: everything looked and read suspiciously AI-made, especially the pictures which promised "ungirevel", "emprety", and "ukxepcted twits". Or maybe "cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops, a pasadise of sweet teats".
Sounds great! Probably! Anyway, whatever anyone expected from Willy's Chocolate Experience, it wasn't this.
And you probably wouldn't have expected the Oompa-Loompas – sorry, "Wonkidoodles," per the script – would look as miserable as this.
And you definitely didn't expect The Unknown, an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls. And also makes chocolate there. And wants to steal Willy's "anti-graffiti gobstopper".
The more you looked at it, the more ludicrous stuff there was to enjoy. At the end of the experience, kids got one or two jelly beans and a quarter-cup of limeade. The script which the actors involved were meant to work with – described by one as"15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things" – also leaked. You can read that here. How about a walk-round of the whole thing?
And you can also buy Cameos from young actors who played The Unknown and the miserable Oompa-Loompa, who also went on This Morning. So at least someone's getting something out of the whole thing.
Rat hole
In January, the Chicago comedian Winslow Dumaine pointed out a hole in the cement of West Roscoe Street's pavement. It was shaped exactly like a rat which had been sadly splattered into the cement and left a cavity, like the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum. It had been around for years and years, but suddenly the Chicago rat hole became a pilgrimage site. People left coins, flowers, little tributes for the soul of The Unknown Rat, Viagra pills. The mystery was part of the allure. Who was this rat? And were they even a rat at all? Some suggested that the hole was in fact made by a squirrel falling from a tree into the wet cement. The New York Times called it "Chicago's Stonehenge".
Then, just as suddenly, it was filled in. The rat hole was no more. But Chicago would not stand for that. One local, Jonathan Howell, dug out the rat hole again using his car's license plate. "As a Chicagoan, I feel the preservation of history is important," he told the New York Times.
And it's since gone back to being the sacred place it always was, and there has now been at least one marriage at the Chicago rat hole.
It's what he/she would have wanted.
And the best of 2023
Kevin James
Some memes are born out of a cultural moment, a shared experience which we need to compute through lower case captions and image macros. Some gradually build meaning over time, hitting a critical mass at which everyone understands them and can start to subvert and experiment with them.
And sometimes – when the wind blows in the right direction, and the stars align – one of Kevin James' old headshots from King of Queens goes viral.
Why is it funny? Big question. It's the shrug. It's the little smirk. It's the not-quite-casual-enough off-duty look whoever was on wardrobe duties has given him. It's the Paul Blart: Mall Cop of it all. He's sheepish. He's sort of pleased with himself. He's got both hands in both pockets.
And it's just endlessly reusable. That look on James' face says: hey, you know what I'm like, buddy. I'm gonna do it again. You just watch.
Barbie v Oppenheimer
It's been a long time since we had a proper, no-holds-barred, honest-to-goodness summer blockbuster showdown in the cinemas, but this July is one for the ages. First, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One boots all other actioners into the stratosphere. Then, a week and a half later, Christopher Nolan's extremely serious, extremely star-filled biopic of the philosopher-king of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, comes out on the same day as Greta Gerwig's extremely not-serious, extremely star-filled kinda-biopic of the philosopher-queen of Barbieland, Barbie. The imagined rivalry between the two camps has been ripe memeing territory.
Naturally, people are trying to work out how best to work the potential double-bill come the weekend.
Our suggestion: meet the gang for 11am, bottomless brunch, Barbie, late lunch, Oppenheimer, sit down with an old fashioned, stare into the void, bed.
The coronation of King Charles
So, Yung Chaz finally got his hands on the crown after 70-odd years of apprenticeship. It absolutely pissed it down, as is tradition for coronations in the UK, and all the other pageantry was deployed with the usual solemnity. But if Elizabeth II had the first televised coronation, Charles III had the first memed coronation. Two big moments stood out.
First, there was Charles looking slightly mystified at what he was being told to say by the guy holding his lines. (You'd have thought he'd be off-book by previews, but anyway.)
Then there was Penny Mordaunt in her very snazzy outfit and wielding a sword as Lord President of the Council. We dodged a bullet here: if the Queen had carked it a year earlier, Jacob Rees-Mogg would have been on sword duties.
The mix of celebs and posh nobs was quite a thing to see. Ant and Dec were there, plus Lionel Richie, Dame Emma Thompson and a very confused Katy Perry.
And they let some where-are-they-now types in to beef up the numbers too.
So a fine time was had by all. And, in the end, quite a lot of peaceful protestors were arrested and kept in cells for 16 hours despite having run their plans past police beforehand, and some bystanders who had nothing to do with anything got carted away too. Yet another good day's work for the Met! They really are on a roll at the minute, aren't they?
Boris Johnson faces the music
And so, finally, three years after the start of the pandemic and 18 months after the first reports of leaving dos, booze-ups and ABBA-assisted shindigs celebrating Dominic Cummings' resignation, Boris Johnson was hauled in front of MPs to answer to accusations of misleading the House of Commons.
The three-hour session at the privileges committee was the first time that he'd been forced to undergo a proper examination with proper consequences. If the committee finds that his statement to the House – that no lockdown rules had been broken in 10 Downing Street despite a run of what looked suspiciously like parties – was said while knowing it wasn't true, he could be suspended from Parliament. A suspension of 10 or more days means his Uxbridge constituents could call for him to face a by-election, which could see him lose his seat. High stakes stuff, even if there's more 'coulds' in there than you'd expect in a political thriller.
So naturally it was appointment to view stuff, with Johnson occasionally taking advice from his £5,000 an hour lawyer Lord Pannick. Pannick, who's also working with Manchester City on their case with the Premier League where they're accused of breaking financial rules, was semi-regularly spotted looking slightly less than satisfied with something. Perhaps it was the questions being fired at his client. Perhaps it was the fact Johnson got a right hump on at one point and started having a pop at the committee. Either way, the eyebrows were very lively.
We await the committee's report, but it didn't feel like Johnson had managed to talk anyone round to his way of thinking.
At the very least, there are about three more stages at which the memes will cascade. Say what you like about Johnson, the man knows how to generate content.
Gary Lineker vs the actual government
Now that some time has passed, it's hard to fathom quite how thoroughly the Gary Lineker story shoved absolutely everything else off the news agenda. At one point the Telegraph had eight different comment pieces about it running simultaneously.
On Twitter Lineker criticised it as an "immeasurably cruel policy" which was being used against "the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s". Suella Braverman said that was "irresponsible". In short order, Lineker was forcibly stood down from Match of the Day duties by high-ups in the BBC.
This did not, it's fair to say, go down the way that the BBC high-ups intended it to.
First to support Lineker was known mensch and all round good guy Ian Wright. "Everybody knows what Match of the Day means to me, but I've told the BBC I won't be doing it tomorrow," he tweeted. "Solidarity." Alan Shearer joined him at the barricades shortly afterwards. Then Alex Scott pulled out of Football Focus, the commentators said they wouldn't work on Match of the Day, and the presenters of the BBC's goals service Final Score followed suit. It all looked quite desperate for the Beeb, and deeply impressive for its unofficial football production union.
What started as a dispute over a tweet by one of its biggest stars turned into an existential crisis for the BBC, with all and sundry chiming in over the hypocrisy of the corporations dealings with Lineker – Lord Sugar tweeted quite a lot of stuff about hating Jeremy Corbyn, for instance – and the fact that the Richard Sharp, the BBC chairman, donated £400,000 to the Conservatives and still stands accused of helping Boris Johnson sort out a loan while he was Prime Minister. It all smells slightly funny.
So in the end there was no football coverage on BBC TV that Saturday. Come 10.30pm, we got not Match of the Day, but an unbranded value-pack knock-off version called 'Premier League highlights'. It showed the highlights, but with just crowd noise and no analysis. It was rubbish.
Nonetheless lots of Tories turned up to insist that actually – actually! Funnily enough! – preferred this weird state of affairs. Scott Benton, MP for Blackpool South, said that it was the best edition "in years" as in a break with six decades of precedent it "had all the goals in". He also claimed it "finished quicker than usual so I could make the pub for last orders," which, if true, sounds like a cry for help.
By the middle of the following week, Lineker had been given an apology and was back on usual duties. What an absolute palaver.
The big red boots
It's been a little while since a look cut through the culture quite so quickly as MSCHF's Astro Boy-inspired big red boots. The brand does like to use New York Fashion Week to make a statement with footwear – in the past they've done Birkenstocks made of recycled Hermés bags and a pair of boots which look like those giant plastic casts footballers wear when their metatarsal's gone – but none had the impact of the big red boots.
But why? Well, the proportions are perfect. Big enough to look completely absurd but just about small enough to actually walk around in, they're yours for just $350.
A press release offered some more intel. "Cartoonishness is an abstraction that frees us from the constraints of reality," it said. "If you kick someone in these boots, they go boing!"
They were a massive pain in the arse to actually get off your feet once they were in, but it's a small price to pay to be king for the eight days or so that everyone was obsessed with them.
Angela Bassett did the thing
Now, we all love the Baftas. They're a great and glorious thing. They can, however, be a little bit dry at times. This year was something of an exception.
Arianna DeBose of Hamilton, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story and Westworld, followed Richard E Grant's opening monologue with a medley of Eurythmics' 'Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves' and Sister Sledge's 'We Are Family' which climaxed with a self-composed rap which recalled that bit in 'Vogue' where Madonna gives thanks for Grace Kelly and Jean Harlow and that: "Angela Bassett did the thing, Viola Davis my Woman King / Blanchett, Cate, you're a genius, and Jamie Lee, you are all of us!"
The whole thing was baffling, but it was that first line – "Angela Bassett did the thing" – and the shoulder-shimmy that accompanied it, which really went big. The whole thing got a bit of a kicking.
"I think it’s incredibly unfair, to be frank," Bafta producer Nick Bullen told Variety of the backlash to DeBose's performance. "I absolutely loved it. Everybody I’ve spoken to who was in the room absolutely loved it."
"She only had a few weeks to put this whole thing together. She worked with a great musical director and choreographer. So it was a real team effort. She had an amazing team around her, and she and her team put the whole piece together."
But then the bafflement turned into full-blooded veneration of a moment of high camp which generally gets purged from big pop cultural ceremonies in the UK. Lizzo and Adele shouted it out onstage. It even started getting played in clubs.
And it all came full circle at the NAACP Image Awards, where Bassett did indeed do the thing by winning entertainer of the year.
Bassett DM'd DeBose to check she was OK (she was) and Jamie Lee Curtis came out swinging on DeBose's behalf too: "For me it was joyous, celebratory, sisterly, hot, spicy, and she's just so incredibly talented." A happy ending all round.
Man City v the Premier League
In perhaps the biggest news to hit English football since the vanishing spray finally did for encroaching at free kicks, the Premier League has alleged that Manchester City broke its competition rules on 101 occasions in the 13 seasons from 2009/10.
The four-year investigation has suggested that City failed to, among other things, give "a true and fair view of the club’s financial position" and didn't "include full details" of how it remunerated staff. The club denies any wrongdoing.
But deny as it may, it can't stop fans from other clubs rubbing their thighs with glee at the idea of the champions being busted down a division, and being made to hand back any pots won during the disputed period, and possibly also forced to have their Etihad sponsorship taken off their shirts and replaced by a sign reading "I AM A BIG STUPID BABY".
Harry's big book bonanza
The first big to-do of 2023 was the release of Spare, the autobiography of the royal FKA Prince Harry. There were lots of bits which caught the eye, but if you wanted the full experience you really needed to invest in the audiobook version.
Quite a lot of knob chat in there. The word 'todger' is simultaneously the only word you'd expect a man of Harry's station to use for his penis, and also the worst one he could possible have chosen. Todger. Me todger. This ol' todger o' mine. Young todge.
Anyway. Lots of fun was had with the bits in between the bits where he was excoriating the Royal Family for all sorts of alleged misdeeds, bad vibes and straight-up horribleness. Spare is not the kind of book you can just walk straight back into the family Christmas do from. It is a hand grenade lobbed into a kennels full of corgis. But then, we've all felt like doing something similar at one job or another.
