This Week's Best Memes, Ranked

Here at Digg, we try our best to cover the most important and confounding memes that come across the timeline. But the web is littered with tons of great memes that never quite hit the mainstream, instead bouncing around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.

Enter: our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked, where we not only rank the funniest memes each week, we also keep a running top 10 of the best memes of 2019. Skip to that here.

For the week of June 24, we have a handful of contenders: Pokémon Mashups, Wrong Answers Only, Praxis, Kawhi Leonard and How To Train Your Dragon memes.

The meme: This is a simple three-panel meme that folks on Reddit and Instagram have taken to labeling and sharing. There are three characters from the "How To Train Your Dragon" movie series that factor into the meme: Toothless, the black dragon putting himself out there; Light Fury, the white dragon taken aback by Toothless' forwardness; and Hiccup, the human egging the whole exchange on from afar. Very wholesome.

Verdict: Let's take a second to give it up for the multi-panel animated movie screengrab meme format. Memes exactly like this have been around for literally years, and yet we're still finding new emotions to capture and share online.

Anyway. This is a fine meme that is just short of cracking into our top ten on this crowded meme week. 

The meme: Taken from a longer video posted by Toronto Raptors teammate Serge Ibaka, this is a short clip of Kawhi Leonard uttering the immutable phrase "what it do babyyyy!" directly to camera. It's relatable and expressive, and people ran with it on Twitter, Reddit and other places NBA (and, importantly, NBA-adjacent) fans congregate.

Verdict: We finally got a good Kawhi Leonard meme for the masses. Basketball fans have been poking fun at his laugh and freakish talents for roundball for years, but to be a true basketball superstar,you need to have memes with mass appeal. Is this the best meme in the whole world? Definitely not, but it's good enough to finally land him in a weekly top ten. What can I say? The board man gets meme'd.

The meme: The first debate for the Democratic presidential nomination was Wednesday night, and Twitter was set ablaze with memes after candidate and representative from Texas Beto O'Rourke opened up his mouth and let Spanish flow out of it.

Verdict: Fine memes, but we will see much better politics content between now and 2020. In fact, there might even better a better politics meme in this very roundup...

The meme: An older meme format (some popular examples go back as far as February 2019) this type of post involves posting a screenshot — usually of a movie and calling followers to name the movie with "wrong answers only." These generate long threads of answers, sometimes funny and almost always very, very wrong.

Verdict: I think these are very funny and a welcome form of meme-y conversation into film Twitter's discourse. Clearly I'm not the only one who thinks this, but that does not mean these memes don't have haters:

The meme: Comedian and socialist organizer Simone Norman posted a video to Twitter where she drops a bunch of socialist buzzwords in the character of an unserious DSA convert. Watch right here:

Pulling quotes from this video (including just uttering the word "praxis") has become its own meme, which the memers of Left Twitter (including Norman herself) have run with.

Verdict: In a week with *two* Democratic presidential debates, another leftist meme comes out ahead of the pack. That's politics, I guess.

Still, it's very deserved. The praxis meme is exactly what good memes should be: an earworm for your brain that seeps into other areas of your life, making you laugh and think about things in new ways. Applying memes to seemingly unrelated topics, both online and off?

The meme: In 2013, developer and Pokémon fan Alex Onsager made a beautiful tool that mashes together the names and sprites of Pokémons original cast of 151 creatures. This week, those mutated monsters made a comeback in meme form. All over the internet, memers used these lil guys as both the punchlines to their jokes and as standalone jokes entirely.

Verdict: Pokémon memes never die. These take first place in a packed week for one reason: extreme versatility. I'm no math expert, but 151 Pokémon to mash up with one another allows for thousands of combinations, I'm pretty sure. Some of those are duds, sure. But so many are gold, and I keep seeing new, imaginative and quality mashups every day, and I hope to see more. I choose you, Pokémon mashup memes!

Click each entry on the ranking to see when it debuted.

The wife and the wife guy: queen and king of meme discourse.

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Source: Digg.com

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