The top 10 memes, viral videos, and online goings-on that defined 2022 - yearbywartime

Alex from Target. Meghan Trainor. The Ice Bucket Challenge (brrrr!). Those are fitting 3 of the 10 biggest memes and videos that went viral in 2022. If you can call them all, you'atomic number 75 either incredibly connected OR incredibly tormented.

I'm non going to lie to you: IT took me forever to pull this list together because I unbroken acquiring distracted by opposite videos and memes. Here's hoping the homophonic fate doesn't await you as you read on.

1. Alex From Target breaks Twitter

alex from target cropped — A portion of the original photo of Alex From Target.

Shortly ago, Alex Lee was just your ordinary teenager. Helium went to train. He had a part-time line of work at Target. Entirely normal teenage stuff. Then someone went and tweeted a "espy" photo of him bagging groceries.

Literally all-night, Alex went from a kid disagreeable to spend a penny a few bucks to an Net sensation and something of a teenaged heartthrob. He became a trending subject on Twitter, and even got to join Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show. Internet users responded by recognizing retail workers in their ain neighborhoods, like Steve From Starbucks and Betty From Wal-Mart.

2. 'Too Many Cooks' breaks our brains

If you're a product of the 80s and 90s, sitcoms from the era have likely left an indelible mark. After entirely, who hasn't caught themselves humming the the theme from Night Court?

Just me? Oh.

"To a fault Some Cooks," an 11-minute video aired late at night on Adult Swim, takes this Idiot box kitsch and elevates it to a whole new level of absurdity. It starts as a spoof of sitcom opening credits and, well, takes quite a turn. And then another. And some other. And…

Just try to watch it without having your brain melt. I daring you. (Make headway warning: It's somewhat NSFW.)

3. 'All About That Low' won't leave my head

Suddenly, it's all over—on TV. Along the tuner. On the news. And even if you don't love about IT, you someway know about it. What is it? Meghan Trainor's absurdly attention-getting song, "Every About That Bass."

The strain, which takes aim at society's unrealistic's standards of beauty, currently ranks 10th on the iTunes Store's apical songs list. The music television stands at over 400 million views on YouTube as of this writing, and information technology's spawned uncounted parodies and mentions in other touristy media. Not severe for a song that's only about cardinal months white-haired.

4. Neither will Weird Camellia State's 'Cheap'

I nevertheless experience Pharrell Williams' song "Happy" stuck in my head, but Weird Al had his way with the catchy tune up and somehow made it symmetrical more catchy? Is that even possible? Re-watch and judge for yourself.

5. Large-hearted gift goes viral

No list of memes and infective agent videos would be complete without the Ice Bucketful Challenge. Information technology started sometime in 2022 every bit a way to raise money for Polemonium van-bruntiae, but it became primarily a way to support ALS research. And by the summer of 2022, it became something of a cultural phenomenon.

How popular was the ice rink bucket dispute? And then best-selling that evening the CEOs of totally the biggest names in tech took part in the delirium.

Not everyone was connected board, though: Will Oremus at Slate criticized the Ice Bucketful Challenge, locution, "More than than anything else, the ice bucket videos feel like an exercise in raising cognizance of nonpareil's ain zaniness, altruism, and/or attraction in a wet Jersey." Atomic number 2 instead encouraged his readers to just give money without sousing themselves with ice H2O.

Still, the Ice Bucket Challenge seems to hold worked: The ALS Understructure says it has received over $115 meg in donations since deep July.

6. Joe Biden as Joe Biden

Vice President Joe Biden is no stranger to memes, and he got the Internet's attention a couple of times this year, especially when, well, when this happened back in January.

A new increase to The Legend of Biden is the Sad Joe Biden meme, in which citizenry write captions for a pic of Biden agaze out a window at the White House.

7. Cats lower for…something

Cats still rule the Internet—we know this to be a fact. Flux adorable kittens with electronic dance music and you get Kitty Jam. The video features two cats bobbing their heads to Disk-jockey Serpent and Lil Jon's "Lour For What," and I could watch it on replicate for hours.

D'aww.

8. Devil Baby Attacks!

What would you do if you heard a infant crying in a baby buggy with nary sign of the child's parents seeable? You'd probably walkway over and investigate, right? That's exactly what the hapless folks who were lured in by the Devil Baby did, sole to have the everliving crap scared out of them.

The Devil Cocker, of course, isn't really the spawn of Satan; instead, it's an animatronic creation from the folks behind the motion-picture show Devil's Owing. Very funny…unless you fall for it.

9. The Internet won't let it go, let it go

The force of care circumferent Disney's Fixed raged on in 2022 (it never bothered me, anyway), and it's carried over to YouTube. Ut a quick search for "let information technology go parody"on YouTube, and you'll get over a million results.

10. Going viral to induce a change

From #YesAllWomen to #BlackLivesMatter, the Internet once again showed it can foster important discussion that sporting power lead to lasting change.

Unity highly publicized video tackled the issue of catcalling: Information technology followed a woman arsenic she walked through Manhattan for ten hours and captured some of the responses she received from men as she walked past. With 38 jillio views, it was one of YouTube's upper side trending videos of 2022.

Just zero viral video recording screw-topped this:

Bonus: 'Gangnam Panach' literally breaks YouTube

Psy's Gangnam Style is not a 2022 phenomenon, but it's remained popular online despite decent mature news. In 2022, The Meme That Will Never Buy the farm surpassed 2,147,483,647 views—the point at which YouTube's views counter stopped employed.

YouTube has since fixed the issue, allowing the view counter to retain counting, but if anything, American Samoa our Brad Chacos pointed out, the news of the broken forestall gave us all another excuse to wonder at Psy's masterpiece.