After browsing KnowYourMeme for a while, I settled on one of my favorite memes on the internet: Woman Yelling at a Cat. I am sure that most have seen some version of this meme on social media. In case you aren't familiar, the meme depicts Taylor Armstrong from 'The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills' being restrained by Kyle Richards as she yells at a cat from across the dinner table:
The origin of this meme is interesting as it is actually two different memes combined. The first originated from a 2011 episode of 'Housewives' in which Armstrong is crying during an argument while Richards attempts to calm her. The scene was then screenshot and featured in a recap article in the Daily Mail.
The image of a stunned cat named Smudge sitting at a table was originally posted on Tumblr in 2018 and went on to become a popular reaction meme. Prior to being combined, the individual memes had sparing use on various platforms. As with all memes, the creation of the combined meme can be traced back to a single person who first posted it, in this case a user on Twitter in 2019. That initial tweet went viral, eventually gaining over 78K retweets in two months.
One of the reasons I like this meme is that the reason it's amusing is because it is a near universal experience. At some point in our lives, we have all either been either Taylor, Kyle or the cat. There is an endless number of real life scenarios in which this meme can be applied. As with all memes, it's a good example of how the internet provides users with the ability to appropriate various disparate pieces of content to form new content to gain followers and engagement.
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