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The REAL Story Behind Hilarious Internet Memes (1/3)

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Every meme has a moment before it went viral, and that moment rarely looks anything like the joke it became.

A new video from TheThings Celebrity series, The REAL Story Behind Hilarious Internet Memes, tracks down the ordinary people and unplanned photographs sitting behind ten of the internet’s most recycled images. The pattern holds across almost every case: someone got their picture taken on a normal day, had no say in what happened next, and watched a single frame outlive whatever they were actually doing at the time.

• The “Crying Jordan” meme comes from Michael Jordan’s September 11, 2009 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech, photographed by the Associated Press’s Stephan Savoia.
• “Scumbag Steve” is Blake Boston, a Boston rapper known as “Weezy B” with the Beantown Mafia, photographed by his own mother around 2006 before the image surfaced on Reddit in 2011.
• “Bad Luck Brian” started as Kyle Craven’s deliberately goofy seventh-grade yearbook photo, posted to Reddit in 2012 by a friend with a caption about failing a driving test.

The Tears That Became a Punchline

Jordan wasn’t performing for the camera when Savoia caught him mid-sentence during his Hall of Fame speech. He was genuinely overcome, thanking teammates, coaches and family after a career that defined the sport for a generation. Internet users didn’t care about the context — they cropped his face out of the frame entirely and started dropping it onto anyone who’d just lost, choked, or gotten embarrassed, a habit that took off in the early 2010s and never really stopped.

One AP photographer’s crop of a Hall of Fame speech turned into the internet’s all-purpose symbol of defeat.

The image has since been pasted onto losing athletes, disappointed politicians and just about every sports team that’s blown a lead, proof that a photo taken for one reason can end up meaning something the subject never intended.

From Family Snapshot to Global Punchline

Blake Boston’s “Scumbag Steve” photo wasn’t staged for strangers at all — his mother shot it around 2006 for a MySpace upload, cap tilted, fur coat on, nothing more dramatic than a promo picture. It sat online for years before someone pulled it onto Reddit in 2011 and turned it into shorthand for inconsiderate behavior of every kind, from bad roommates to worse boyfriends.

Kyle Craven’s story follows the same track. His “Bad Luck Brian” photo was a deliberate joke for his seventh-grade yearbook — goofy grin, sweater vest, the whole bit — until a friend posted it to Reddit in 2012 with a caption about failing a driving test. The caption format exploded from there, pairing Craven’s picture with every rotten outcome imaginable, and it’s stuck around as one of the format’s most durable running gags.

The Webcam Stare and the Smirk by the Fire

Laina Morris became “Overly Attached Girlfriend” after submitting a wide-eyed webcam parody to a Justin Bieber fan contest, an entry that was supposed to be a joke about obsessive fandom and instead got read as genuine and spread everywhere. Zoe Roth’s path was even more accidental — she was photographed as a kid smirking in front of a controlled firefighter training fire, a picture her father took that later became “Disaster Girl,” the go-to caption for anything gleefully chaotic.

Both cases land on the same point the series keeps making: nobody involved was trying to build a persona. The internet did that part on its own, long after the shutter clicked.

Photographs Outlasting Their Original Moments

None of these images were built to travel. Jordan’s tears, Boston’s MySpace pose, Craven’s yearbook smile, Morris’s webcam clip, Roth’s backyard smirk — every one was a private moment before Reddit, 4chan and Tumblr users decided it belonged to everyone. That’s the through-line the video keeps circling back to: the caption always outlasts the context, and the person in the photo rarely gets a vote on either.

For anyone who’s followed how quickly an unguarded photo turns into a punchline online, it’s worth pairing this one with Reporters Who Ruined Their Careers On Social Media and Celebrity Doppelgängers Who Look Freakishly Alike — different setups, same lesson about how little control anyone has once a face starts circulating.