Nice Meme

About

“Nice Meme” is an ironic expression often used as a dismissive response to poorly received content posted in circle jerk communities online in a similar vein to the phrase “dank memes”.

Origin

The exact origin of the ironic usage of the phrase “nice meme” is unknown. On February 9th, 2013, the earliest archived instance on 4chan was posted to a thread in the /mu/ (music) board (shown below).^[2]

Spread

On December 24th, 2013, a 4chan user replied to a post featuring a poorly-drawn trollface with “nice meme” followed by the dorito face emoticon (shown below).

On February 4th, YouTuber Reddit Circlejerk uploaded a video titled “Nice Meme,” featuring an animated illustration of Barack Obama singing the phrase (shown below, left). On February 9th, Reddit Circlejerk uploaded footage of a Flappy Bird parody titled “Flappy Fedora,” which plays an audio clip of a man saying “nice meme” after successfully passing a flying fedora between cans of Mountain Dew (shown below, right).

On March 9th, the single serving website Niceme.me^[1] was launched, which displays the message “Nice meme!” accompanied by the same audio clip from the “Flappy Fedora” parody. On May 22nd, a Facebook^[6] page titled “Nice Memes” was launched. On August 7th, YouTuber Keith Smerbeck uploaded a video titled “real nice,” in which he plays the Niceme.me audio recording repeatedly while saying “nice meme” (shown below).

On September 17th, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott posted a photograph of himself posing with two young aboriginal children in Arnhem Land, Australia to his official Facebook^[3] page. That day, Redditor OrangeMemes_2 linked to the photo in a post titled “Everybody let Tony Abbott know how nice his meme is by commenting ‘nice meme’ on this post” to the /r/braveryjerk^[4] subreddit. The Facebook photo was subsequently flooded with users commenting “nice meme,” gathering upwards of 2,500 comments in the next six months. That day, BuzzFeed^[5] posted an article about the incident.