The End

As this is my tenth and final post, I thought it would only be appropriate to introduce you all to the reason this blog exists in the first place. That reason, my friends, is Kilroy.

 

Thanks, pal. 

Kilroy is a bald man with a huge nose drawn peeking over a wall, usually accompanied by the phrase "Kilroy was here." Kilroy is widely regarded as the first meme to go viral, if not the first meme period; he began popping up during World War II, perhaps most famously at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, where Joseph Stalin saw him in a bathroom stall and demanded to know who he was. 

However, no one is quite sure who exactly "Kilroy" is. The most prevalent theory is that the image is meant to represent shipyard inspector James Kilroy, who wrote down the phrase on items to prove he had indeed looked them over. Then, U.S. soldiers spread the image all over the world, drawing it in bombed-out villages and on tanks, just to name a few places. 

It's funny to think how such a simple, silly little piece of graffiti went "viral", so to speak, in a time where that sort of cultural exposure was nearly impossible. Perhaps it's a reflection on the nature of memes themselves; maybe they don't need the Internet to spread like wildfire. Memes have often been used to typify the Internet: pointless, stupid, and trite. But if they existed before the Internet, and spread without its influence, can critics continue to deride them as meaningless drivel spewed forth by some clowns online.

Another noteworthy aspect of this meme is its lifespan, probably the longest in meme history. I've mentioned before how most memes are generally short-lived; they typically have a lifespan of a few week before fading away into obscurity, allowing the next one to come along and replace it. A certain few have been around for much longer, many of which you automatically think of when you hear the word "meme."

Love them or hate them, memes have absorbed into the fabric of our culture; Kilroy is the perfect example of that, having existed for 75 years, if not always in the public eye. And as I hope you've learned from this blog, memes have a lot to tell us about how our society and culture operate, which is not something you'd typically think of when stumbling across them on Twitter. And if that doesn't appeal to you, well...I have memes. They're funny. Everyone likes looking at them. No arguments.

Kidding, of course. I personally find memes hilarious, much more so than the garbage the Internet is always trying to shove down our throats. Something else you can take away from this blog: memes are treasures of the Internet, and a fair few of them will be remembered long after we're gone. (Probably not, but it's funny to imagine some future society treating them like fine art.) So with that hopeful sentiment, I'll leave you here, hopefully with many more memes for you to stumble across as you peruse the Internet for something entirely unrelated.