Hundreds of years from now when your great-great-great-grandchildren will be studying classical memes for Memes 101 class at the University of Harambe, they will surely examine the case of the Bad Luck Brian meme. An ominous subject indeed, as Brian has suffered through all of our collective nightmares, from calling your teacher mom to saying “happy condolences” at a funeral, and much, much worse. He paid a steep price to be one of the founding columns of the meme-obsessed world we now proudly live in, therefore his uncomfortably red grinning face and huge grill are forever imprinted in our brains.
He was a part of the Advice Animals series of the early popular memes, in which a certain image is given a captioned text to represent the type of advice, situation, or event that is associated with the image. In the case of Brian meme – bad luck.
Bad Luck Brian Meme Origins
It seems though that it wasn’t bad luck for Kyle Craven, the actual person in the photo, whose friend uploaded his yearbook photo on Reddit with a bad luck tone, and the internet proceeded to do its magic. Here’s the one that started it all, and the second one which caused the avalanche that reached its full strength thanks to websites like 9gag, Buzzfeed, and Funny or Die.
The second meme truly caused an avalanche, but the worst kind, a shits avalanche. A trend in which the lower caption remains consistent, logically, didn’t pass Brian, and in his case, the text was, fittingly, “Shits”.
No internet fame story is complete without the hero embracing his 15 minutes, but the matter in which it happened to Brian, err… Kyle was it?, is too fitting and almost too good to be true. But it is and we thank the internet gods for it. Kyle went back to the place where it all started, Reddit, and attempted to do an AMA thread in the Ask Me section. Buuuuuut, he was majestically put down as the moderators removed the post, claiming that the post doesn’t have any value as the creator, a.k.a. Brian, didn’t do anything of importance and value. Something that didn’t happen to say, Ridiculously Photogenic Guy.
Although, the crowd was sympathetic with Kyle, downvoting the moderators and giving Brian a single instance of good luck in his meme-life as Kyle did his AMA, just in a different subreddit.
Besides this misfortune, Kyle claims that Brian’s fate didn’t rub off on him and that he, actually, was quite lucky, winning two pretty cool prizes in his life (PSP and a Xbox 360), and getting recognized by Seth Rogen for his “role” of BLB.
According to global authority on memes and the most likely founder of the University of Harambe, – knowyourmeme.com, the meme peaked in the middle of 2012, approximately the same time as Good Guy Greg and Scumbag Steve, basically meme cousins of Brian. And it was natural that Bad Luck Brian sometimes didn’t get to be the main point of his own memes, would you like to know more?
The best meme of the Bad Luck Brian series, and arguably the best meme of that whole period. Hats off to whoever made it, the true Good Guy Greg of the internet.
If there is something to learn from memes, and we definitely think so or we wouldn’t start a Kickstarter for UoH (University of Harambe), in the case of a Bad Luck Brian meme it’s that he is smiling despite everything that happened to him.
Do you have your favorite Bad Luck Brian memes? Be a Good Guy Greg and share them in the comments.
