35 Ancient Memes That Are So Wise, Even Merlin Would Approve

At this point, memes are an irreplaceable part of online culture and modern humor overall, spanning several generations. Bored Panda's interviewee, avid internet user Gerda, agrees with such a statement. She has said that she can't imagine the online world without memes — they've been a big part of it since she joined social media, which happened quite a while ago.

And that's isn't a lie — memes started showing up online during "peak millennial days," and since Gerda is younger, so she joined when they were already dominating the internet.

Those millennial memes included things such as the so-called “OG memes,” which included jokes like Philosoraptor — an image series featuring a Velociraptor paired with captions with quirky paradoxes. 

Rage comics were also all the rage (pun intended). They were short cartoon strips that used a set of pre-made cartoon faces depicting rage or some other kind of emotion, painted in Microsoft Paint or similar painting programs of the early 2000s. So, like Trollface and similar characters, if you’re not too young, you’re guaranteed to remember them. 

During the peak millennial memes period, viral videos also started becoming ingrained in the online joke culture. Videos like “Charlie Bit My Finger,” “Harlem Shake,” and all the iconic short videos from Vine — all became part of the history of memes. 

Then came Gen Z and their absurdist humor, relying on randomness and unexpected juxtapositions. A good example of this is the “Grimace Shake” trend that happened a while ago — in it, people filmed themselves drinking a McDonald's milkshake and then abruptly cut to bizarre scenarios — videos that relied on unpredictability and the absurdity of the situation.  

Since our interviewee is a part of this generation, she agreed that memes like these were way more recognizable to her than the previously mentioned ones. She remembers the peak of the aforementioned "Grimace Shake" trend, but said that she hadn't filmed any of them herself.

At the same time, she revealed that from time to time, she likes to film certain trends with her friends, which they find fun to participate in. Yet, she doesn't post them on her public accounts, but rather leaves them as some fun videos to enjoy with friends privately.

So, as you can see from what Gerda said (and from the trends overall), TikTok has a lot of influence over GenZ humor, especially on the virality side. Yet, the popularity of short, odd videos also led to Gen Alpha humor. So far, all of the generations older than this one regard their humor as the weirdest. In fact, some might even call it perplexing. 

Memes like Fanum Tax (taking a percent of someone’s food), the Wise Tree (a sentient tree giving bad advice), and, of course, the famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) Skibidi Toilet (a web series about human heads coming out of toilet bowl fighting with humanoid characters with electronic devices for heads).

So, as you can see, each generation has had a chance to skew the internet humor according to their sense of humor. But that doesn’t mean that several generations can't enjoy the same type of memes — they surely can. 

For example, let’s take the Instagram page “golden_frog_inn,” whose memes we used to make today's list. The page has over 600K followers, so it’s likely that they come from various generations. There’s nothing surprising about it — the memes are actually very funny and kind of charming — using “ancient” images gives them pizazz that other memes sometimes lack. 

What kind of memes are your favorite? Share them with us in the comments and don’t shy away from upvoting the ones you like the best on today’s list!