Search icon

News

26th Oct 2016

It’s official: memes are now more popular than Jesus

Who needs Jesus when you can just pray to Harambe?

Alex Finnis

You remember Jesus, right? Long hair, big beard, died for our sins? Top bloke.

Even 2,000 years after his death, he’s still a pretty popular chap. His official biography is still the best-selling non-fiction book of all time, outselling the likes of “My Story” by Paul Gascoigne, “My Story” by Steven Gerrard and “My Story” by Paul Scholes.

While old Jeezy C is absolutely balling it at the top of the bestsellers chart, it appears that he’s not quite as popular with those goddamn “millennials” everyone keeps talking about, because according to Google Trends, he is now officially less popular than memes.

Screen Shot 2016-10-26 at 10.15.05

As you can see from this graph, which shows a comparison between people searching the terms “Jesus” and “memes” on Google, Jesus’ popularity has remained relatively stable over the past five years, whereas interest in memes has been steadily growing.

Do we put this down to the hard work memes have been doing to put themselves at the forefront of our everyday lives, led by such influential figures as “Dat Boi”, “One Pound Fish Man” and “Damn Daniel’s White Vans”? Or is Jesus just too complacent about his internet footprint? We wouldn’t like to comment, but I will say one thing, I’ve not seen any fresh content from Jesus in a very long time. He doesn’t even have a tumblr.

memes

Memes’ devastating crushing of Our Dear Lord and Saviour was first noticed by @Kuwaddo on Twitter, and while several memes have been posted since her original tweet, Jesus is yet to comment.

There are two very interesting things about this graph we haven’t mentioned yet. Well, one kind of interesting thing, and one incredibly important one that might change the way we look at the world for the rest of eternity.

The first is that those occasional peaks you see on Jesus’ blue graph come at Christmas and Easter, which means that essentially people all over the world are going “why the fuck do I have to buy my aunt Muriel who I thought died four years ago a shitting cookery book?” or “how come I’m eating a chocolate egg for breakfast?”

The second is that according to Google, memes overtook Jesus for the first time in May this year.

What happened in May this year, you wonder. What could possibly have happened in May 2016 that finally caused memes to become more popular than Jesus Henry Christ?

They fucking shot Harambe.

Screen Shot 2016-10-26 at 10.59.48

Yep, that’s right, because of Harambe, memes are now more popular than Jesus.

I’m going to be honest, I’m now kind of losing my mind a bit here. After Harambe died, one of the first memes to pop up was him an an angel with a halo, watching over us from the sky. There are even memes of Harmabe as Jesus himself. Does this mean Harambe has done more than just take over from Jesus in the internet search leagues? Was Harambe actually the second coming of the son of God?

Probably not, because he was a gorilla who lived in a zoo, and yet I’m now 100% convinced that this is the case.

Holy shit.