Welcome to The Meme Time Machine, the first in a series of articles that look back on the long, illustrious history of silly, unimportant things that once dominated the internet.
Memes are a kind of public domain joke. They’re a readily available framework anyone can co-opt, put their own lightly altered spin on, and then release back into the wild. The meme world is so rapidly changing that the formats that dominated the online landscape just a few years ago quickly get lost in the internet’s violent torrents.
This series is all about stopping the flow of memes for just a second so we can pluck one out from the past to better understand our meme present. Today, we begin with a classic in the old school meme format: Bad Luck Brian.
Remember Bad Luck Brian?
The Bad Luck Brian meme regularly made the rounds on Reddit and Tumblr in the early 2010s, as it became the internet shorthand for relaying every cringe-inducing, face-palm-y moment of your life, all punctuated with the image of an awkward, braces-clad teen’s school picture.
It’s a picture that found its way online, thanks to a high school friendship and a Reddit post. Ian Davies, a longtime friend of Kyle Edward Craven, pulled a yearbook snapshot from their Archbishop Hoban High School days featuring Craven sporting a goofy teenage grin that had a shiny set of braces fused to it. He had slightly reddened cheeks and an intentionally dorky sweater vest. I italicize “intentionally” because Craven says he intentionally chose that eyesore of a vest as a goof.
The image was posted to Reddit’s r/AdviceAnimals subreddit with a caption about failing a driving test. It didn’t gain much traction on its own, but later that day, another Redditor noticed it and instantly saw its meme potential. This Redditor, this esteemed man of letters, this no doubt scholar of enormous renown who likely has garnered respect from some of the finest minds in high-level academia, captioned his version of the meme thusly: “Tries to stealthily fart in class… s—ts.”
That’s the one that caught on.
Cue the movie montage of the garage band’s single rocketing up the charts until it hits number one. Because once the bad-luck Brian meme hit it big on Reddit, it soon spread to every early-2010s hangout spot on the internet. 9gag, Tumblr, Funny or Die. BuzzFeed. People all over the internet were using the framework to either relay their own believable tales of misfortune or make up bulls—t to try to pass off as real just because it sounded funny when crammed into the meme context.
At the peak of its popularity, which I would place somewhere in the 2012 to 2014 range purely based on observation, Bad Luck Brian became a vital pillar of the larger “Advice Animals” meme phenomenon that dominated internet humor at the time, along with the likes of Success Kid and Grumpy Cat, meme name, that, to hear them now, seem as quaint and distant as Leave it to Beaver was when I was growing up in the 1990s.
Craven embraced his unexpected fame. He participated in a Reddit AMA, created a Bad Luck Brian YouTube channel and social accounts, and licensed his image for T-shirts, merchandise, and ad campaigns. That includes partnerships with brands like Volkswagen and McDonald’s. He also rode the NFT wave in 2021, selling a Bad Luck Brian token for roughly $36,000. As one of the earlier people to try to cash in on their meme status, he helped create a template that other virally famous folks would follow in the years to come.
Craven holds a degree from Kent State University and, as of recent reports, serves as vice president of his family’s construction company in Ohio.
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