Real People Behind Those Internet Memes

In case you're unfamiliar with the term "meme," it's defined by Google as "a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc. that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users." In other words, memes are those pictures and GIFs that people post in Facebook and comment threads that make you think "Who has time in their life to make these things?" Some memes have become so ubiquitous they now have their own identity which in turn lend a sort of minor celebrity status to the actual people whose photo winds up getting passed all over the Internet for lulz. Here is a list of some of the most popular memes and the real, live humans they're based on.

Bad Luck Brian is the personification of schadenfreude—which means to laugh at the misfortune of others. It sounds mean, but Kyle Craven doesn't mind. In fact, according to an interview with The Washington Post, the photo used for the meme was a picture day outtake that his middle school principal rejected, because Kyle was obviously hamming it up for a gag. Years later, Kyle's friend used the photo to create the first Bad Luck Brian meme and posted it to Reddit. The rest is history, that is if you sadly include people reposting dumb jpegs in comment threads as part of our cultural Internet lexicon. Anyway, Kyle's a project manager for his dad's construction company now, but he still moonlights as Bad Luck Brian, making paid appearances and selling merchandise. It's a nice side gig if you can get it, and you happen to look like Michael Anthony Hall from The Breakfast Club, only nerdier, if that's even possible.

Like Overly Attached Girlfriend, Ermahgerd is basically one young woman's unfortunate facial expression, frozen in time and flung across the interwebs for the amusement and repurposing of the uncaring masses. Unlike Overly Attached Girlfriend, Maggie Goldenberger was actually just innocently messing around with friends, not putting herself on YouTube or trying to win a contest when she became Internet famous. In a Vanity Fair profile of "Ermahgerd," Goldenberger, who is now a nurse, admits she never hoped for or pursued Internet stardom but definitely had fun watching it from afar. That has to be the healthiest way to handle it should you ever find yourself accidentally becoming the butt of the Internet's joke, because no future employer wants to see "Went to Comic-Con as 'Dumb Face Girl' for a while" on your resume.

The diabolical-looking kid oddly smirking in front of a full-on house fire is actually Zoe Roth, the daughter of photographer Dave Roth, who knew exactly what he was doing when he snapped the shot in 2004. Again, from Know Your Meme, Roth even entered the photo in a contest for JPG Magazine, which ultimately led to its wildfire-like spread across the web around 2008. Disaster Girl became primarily a Photoshop meme in which contributors placed Zoe's face in front of historic or publicly prominent tragedies. While the meme enjoyed brief popularity, Dave Roth also maintained a blog called Traveling Roths. He stopped updating it in 2014, probably because none of these photos looked like his children could telekinetically burst a house into flames, so it's amazing it lasted that long.

Another meme to come from an actual thing, rather than a random photo posted to the web, is The Most Interesting Man In The World. It is obviously based on the hugely popular Dos Equis marketing campaign of the same name. The suave character, played by Jonathan Goldsmith, has now become one of the most ubiquitous images in the meme game, used to mock everything from sports to politics to religion. According to an NPR interview, Goldsmith went from being a garbageman to being a character actor for decades before finding a big break selling beer. He doesn't always get lucky, but when he does, he makes a fortune somehow convincing everyone some old guy is the coolest person to ever exist.