Who Actually Made That? The Wild, Weird History of the Internet's Most Famous Memes

Somewhere out there, a Hungarian photographer named Antonio Guillem is living his life, completely aware that a photo he shot for a stock image website in 2015 became the defining visual metaphor for distraction, temptation, and the human capacity to completely ignore the person right in front of you.

And somewhere else, a cartoonist named KC Green is watching his drawing of a dog calmly sipping coffee in a burning room get deployed — every single day, on every single platform — to describe everything from minor inconveniences to genuine civilizational collapse.

These are the people who made the memes. And almost nobody knows their names.

Welcome to meme archaeology — the surprisingly rigorous, occasionally obsessive practice of digging through layers of reposts, remixes, and misattributions to find the actual source of the internet's funniest (and most enduring) jokes.

The Problem With Meme Memory

The internet has a funny relationship with history. On one hand, everything is technically archived somewhere — the Wayback Machine, Reddit's oldest threads, ancient 4chan posts that nobody has thought about in a decade. On the other hand, the cultural memory of the internet is shockingly short and wildly inaccurate.

Ask a random person when the "distracted boyfriend" meme started, and they'll probably guess 2017 or 2018 — because that's when it hit peak saturation on Twitter and Facebook. They'd be wrong. The original photo was uploaded to the stock site iStock in 2015. It spent nearly two years in relative obscurity before a Spanish Twitter account used it to make a joke about political parties, and then — almost overnight — the whole world discovered it simultaneously.

This is what meme researchers (yes, this is a real field, and yes, the job title sounds like something you'd make up) call "delayed ignition." The content exists quietly, sometimes for years, until some combination of timing, platform algorithm, and cultural mood suddenly makes it the perfect vessel for a shared feeling. Then it explodes, and everyone assumes it was always this famous.

The Reddit Detectives Who Do This For Free

If you want to find the actual origin of a meme, your best bet is a corner of Reddit called r/NameThatMeme or the more forensically-minded r/OutOfTheLoop. These communities are populated by people who treat meme provenance the way other people treat true crime — with intense focus, impressive research skills, and an almost unsettling amount of free time.

We spoke with one prolific contributor who goes by the username "TemporalPixel" (they declined to share their real name, which felt appropriate), who has spent years tracing meme genealogies.

"The thing people don't realize," TemporalPixel told us, "is that almost no meme format is original. What looks like a brand new joke on Twitter in 2023 is almost always a remix of something from Tumblr in 2014, which was itself a remix of something from Something Awful in 2007. The formats mutate. The text changes. The cultural context shifts completely. But the skeleton is usually ancient by internet standards."

This mutation process is called "memetic drift" — a term borrowed from genetics — and it explains why the same basic joke structure can feel completely fresh to a 22-year-old on TikTok even though a 35-year-old recognizes it as something their LiveJournal friends were doing in 2006.

The 'This Is Fine' Dog: A Meme With a Soul

Let's talk about KC Green's dog, because it deserves its own section.

In 2013, Green — a webcomic artist based in Massachusetts — published a two-panel comic as part of his series Gunshow. In it, a cartoon dog sits at a kitchen table, wearing a little hat, as fire consumes the room around him. In the first panel, he says, "This is fine." In the second, he takes a sip of coffee.

The comic was originally about something much more specific and darker than how it's typically used — it was about the human tendency toward denial in the face of genuine crisis. Green has talked about this in interviews, noting with a kind of resigned humor that the meme almost always gets deployed in exactly the way he intended, just without anyone knowing he intended it.

By 2016, the image had been so thoroughly divorced from its source that most people using it had never heard of KC Green or Gunshow. A crowdfunding campaign to make a plush version of the dog raised over $120,000 — a genuinely wild outcome for a piece of art that most of its fans couldn't correctly attribute.

Green, to his credit, has handled this with the kind of philosophical grace that is either very zen or very tired, depending on the day. "It's strange," he told The Washington Post in 2016. "But it's also kind of the nature of art. Once it's out there, it's not really yours anymore."

How Jokes Get Assigned to the Wrong Era

One of the most consistent findings in meme archaeology is that audiences almost always assume a meme is newer than it actually is. This happens for a few reasons.

First, platform migration — when a meme jumps from a niche platform (say, a specific subreddit or a Discord server) to a mainstream one (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook), it feels brand new to the mainstream audience even if it's been circulating for years in its original community.

Second, remix erasure — when someone edits a meme to fit a new context, the editing often strips away metadata, watermarks, and contextual clues that would point back to the source. The new version gets screenshotted, re-shared, and treated as the original.

Third, and most fascinatingly, nostalgia repackaging — sometimes old memes get deliberately reposted by accounts that frame them as "vintage internet" or "old school memes," which paradoxically makes younger audiences think the meme is older than it actually is. A 2018 meme can get repackaged as a "2010s throwback" by 2024, and nobody bats an eye.

The Distracted Boyfriend's Actual Story

Back to Antonio Guillem. The photographer shot a series of stock images in Barcelona featuring a couple — a man turning to look at another woman while his girlfriend looks on in visible displeasure. He shot it as part of a collection exploring relationship dynamics, uploaded it to iStock, and moved on with his life.

The image sold reasonably well as a stock photo. It appeared in some magazine articles and marketing materials. Normal stock photo stuff.

Then, in August 2017, a Swedish Facebook page used it to make a joke about socialism. A few other political pages picked it up. Then someone used it to make a joke about their own distracted attention span. Then someone used it to describe literally anything involving a preference for one thing over another — new phone vs. old phone, pizza vs. salad, literally any two concepts that could be placed in opposition.

Within weeks, it was everywhere. Guillem found out his photo had become the internet's favorite relationship metaphor through news articles written about the meme itself. He's been interviewed about it several times since, and has generally seemed bemused — a word that feels tailor-made for stock photographers who accidentally become meme legends.

Why Any of This Matters (Besides Being Extremely Interesting)

Meme archaeology isn't just a hobby for internet historians. It actually tells us something important about how humor works as a cultural force.

Jokes don't just make us laugh — they create shared reference points, compress complex feelings into instantly recognizable images, and travel across demographic and geographic lines faster than almost any other form of communication. When a meme about existential dread resonates simultaneously with a teenager in Ohio and a retiree in Florida and a college student in Texas, it's doing something genuinely powerful.

And the fact that the original creators are so often lost in the shuffle? That's worth paying attention to. The next time you forward a meme that perfectly captures your Monday morning mood, there's a real human being somewhere who made that thing — probably in a moment of genuine creative inspiration, probably without any expectation that it would end up in your group chat.

They deserve at least a Google.

The Funny Page is currently accepting applications for our inaugural Meme Archaeology Correspondent position. Requirements: encyclopedic knowledge of internet history, access to the Wayback Machine, and a willingness to explain to your family what you do for work.