Know Your Meme’s Don Caldwell Explains Why Memes Aren’t Just Jokes Anymore

For anyone who has looked at the internet lately and felt completely out of touch, this week’s VICE Culture Club offers some clarity. The show’s host, Jackson Garrett, sits down with Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme , a website dedicated to cataloging memes and internet culture, to talk about how memes went from dumb internet jokes to something much bigger.

Caldwell has been with Know Your Meme since the platform’s earlier internet years. He traces the word “meme” back to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who coined the term in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene , points to pre-internet examples like “ Kilroy Was Here ,” and argues that memes never went away. As the internet moved from message boards and image macros to algorithm-driven feeds like TikTok, Instagram, and X, the form changed too. In his view, slang, trends, redraws, TikTok dance crazes, and even certain influencers all sit inside the same vast ecosystem of culturally transmitted internet behavior.

Garrett also pushes the conversation into the present, asking Caldwell about looksmaxxing as one example of how meme culture now functions as more than internet humor. It can package identity, insecurity, and entire belief systems into viral language that spreads quickly online. But meme culture doesn’t only shape ideas. It also shapes the people absorbed into it.

The episode also pulls in video questions from people who actually became memes themselves, including Tay Zonday, the “Sad Oompa Loompa” actor; Apparently Kid; Airsoftfatty; and the Best Buy or GameStop girl. It’s funny, but it also gets at something real. Caldwell says “memes have gone mainstream” and are “not this thing to be ashamed of anymore.” Now, if someone becomes “just a funny meme,” that attention can turn into money and even “a career.”

That’s meme culture in 2026: absurd on the surface, influential underneath, and embedded in nearly everything. Watch the full Culture Club interview to hear Caldwell explain why memes now reach far beyond the internet.