The original image from the Spiderman TV show used widely for “Me and the Boys” memes
I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of image memes. I just kinda feel like they are a bit too restrictive in what you can turn them into. For most image memes, the joke is pretty much the same regardless of the topic. Grumpy Cat memes all boil down to the joke being Grumpy Cat not liking something or saying something negative. It's not that they can't be funny or the image itself can't be relatable or enjoyable, I just feel like they get to be a bit predictable.
However, there is one massive exception for me. And that is the 2019 meme, "Me and the Boys". On paper, this one shouldn't work for me. As I said, I don't really like image memes, the image uses the villains from the 1960s Spiderman cartoon, which I have no attachment to, and I am definitely not "one of the boys".
Yet still, that little shit-faced grin that all those guys have, it just captures that childish energy better than anything I can compare it to. I expect these funny men in their silly little costumes to look up the word "penis" in the dictionary and make that exact smile.
"Me and the Boys" became a meme at a time where image memes didn't have the same hold on the internet they did 10 years before. What that meant is that the internet had reached a new age, and with this new age came a different way to approach image memes. No longer was it just white text on an image background because now you could alter the image itself to the point where the meme became its own parody. To me, this is my favorite era of internet memes because so often everything plays with your expectations of what you expect it to be. You have the freedom to truly make something new with a joke that has already been used to death. Yet, we hadn't reached modern day where we are now so entrenched in irony where we don't even know why something is funny anymore.
And therefor, "Me and the Boys" really found it's way into my heart. Not only is the image with the text perfect, but the phrase "Me and the Boys" became a part of my vocabulary for that giggling school boy in all of us that thinks it's funny when someone says the word "duty". So it doesn't matter if you are male, all of us can be "me and the boys".
