Charlie Bit My Finger
A dad filming his toddlers in England. The youngest bites the oldest's finger. "Ouch, Charlie! Charlie, that really hurt!" The giggle that followed became the most-viewed video on all of YouTube — and held the crown into 2011.
#Internet Culture
12 items
Chuck Norris Facts
Chuck Norris can divide by zero. The absurdist one-liner engine of 2005 colonized forum signatures, email chains, and lunchrooms — hyperbolic "facts" about one man's toughness that became a shared vocabulary for the whole internet.
FAIL Blog
A photo of a crooked staircase, a sign with a misspelled word, a skateboarder meeting a handrail, each stamped with one word: FAIL. Launched in January 2008 and bought by the lolcats company that spring, FAIL Blog turned a one-word caption into a noun the whole internet used.
iCarly
The Nickelodeon sitcom about a teenage girl running a web show from her apartment, perfectly capturing the moment when online video became the new fame. Carly, Sam, and Freddie's shenanigans and random web-show bits defined what a generation thought being internet-famous looked like—before YouTube influencers made it real.
Keyboard Cat
An orange cat in a blue baby T-shirt, propped up at a keyboard, "playing" a jaunty tune while an off-screen owner works its paws. Charlie Schmidt shot it on VHS in 1984, uploaded it in 2007, and in 2009 the internet decided that every fail video should end with him: play him off, Keyboard Cat.
Leeroy Jenkins
A World of Warcraft guild meticulously plans a raid — and then Leeroy Jenkins, back from making chicken, bellows his own name and charges in alone, wiping everyone. "At least I have chicken" became the internet's shorthand for glorious reckless abandon.
Lolcats / I Can Has Cheezburger?
A grey cat with a caption. In 2007, a website launched around a single image of a cat asking "I can has cheezburger?" — broken English, instant appeal, zero cynicism. Within months the site was pulling over a million hits a day, and a niche 4chan tradition became a phenomenon covered by Time magazine. Lolcats became the grammar of internet humor for a decade, the template for every image macro that followed.
Nostalgia Critic
A man in a black cap and glasses screams at the movies of your childhood. Doug Walker started posting Nostalgia Critic reviews to YouTube on July 3, 2007, got thrown off the site over copyright, built his own, and became the loudest critic of the Flash-era internet.
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
A pixelated banana, dancing. A frantic novelty song, repeating. Together they conquered the early-2000s internet through sheer absurdity, until someone in every room could yell "IT'S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!" and everyone else would groan on cue.
Rickrolling
The internet's favorite bait-and-switch: click a promising link, get Rick Astley's 1987 "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead. Born on 4chan in 2007 and peaking in 2008, it's the prank that never really gave up.
Smosh
Two teenagers lip-syncing the Pokémon theme in their living room, mouths flapping with total commitment. Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla were making dumb videos with their friends before "YouTuber" was a word — and for long stretches of YouTube's first decade, nobody on the platform was bigger.
Snakes on a Plane
Samuel L. Jackson took the job because of the title, the internet spent a year turning the title into a running joke, and New Line reshot the movie to add the line the fans had already written for him. Snakes on a Plane (August 2006) was called perhaps the most internet-hyped film of all time, then opened to $15 million, a gap analysts still call the Snakes on a Plane effect.