Supplied In this top 10, our writer breaks down their favourite memes that came out of 2018. Pray for them and their sanity.
Ah yes. Good ol’ Bongo Cat.
I would classify Bongo Cat as a wholesome meme, a category of
Bongo Cat is cute. It has the purest little smile on its face, and holy hell can it play the bongos.
People who’ve worked with this meme have been incredibly creative with their reinterpretations. Some have worked Bongo Cat into Whiplash; they’ve transformed it into 8-bit. We’ve learned through these edits that the cat is a goddamn musical prodigy, being able to play a multitude of instruments, including the piano, trumpet, keyboard, and more!
If I had half the talent that Bongo Cat had, I wouldn’t be sitting at my desk writing meme reviews for a living.
The deep dark secret of Bongo Cat, however, is that it’s basically just Keyboard Cat reborn. Coming to this realization hurt me a little bit, but ultimately I can’t be too upset by this knowledge. It’s really just demonstrative of culture in general: things get big, command lots of popular appeal, and disappear for a while, only to return years later in a form that’s similar, but not quite the same, to its original rendition.
If anything, this meme is just a love letter to cute cats doing cute things. There’s a universal appeal to it that the internet has capitalized on for ages, and will only continue to do so into the future.
