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The phrase dank meme first emerged in 2013 on message boards within 4chan and Reddit that were dedicated to making parodies of existing memes and mocking meme culture.

According to Know Your Meme, one notable early instance of the phrase featured the so-called Gnome Child (a character from the online game Runescape) with the caption: 鈥渂orn just in time to browse dank memes.鈥� Another shows a baby dressed as a police officer writing a ticket, with the caption 鈥渦r getting a ticket sir that meme wasn鈥檛 dank enough.鈥�

As these examples illustrate, memes that use the phrase dank memes tend to be deliberately unusual, self-referential, and brimming with in-jokes that poke fun at meme creators who think they鈥檙e offering fresh takes on memes but have, in fact, fallen behind the internet鈥檚 fast-changing times and tastes. Calling something a dank meme thus suggests a broader critique of the meteoric rise and fall of viral content. In other words, 鈥淭his meme was funny and cool until it got so popular.鈥�

As Ryan Milner observed in his 2016 book, The World Made Meme, the phrase has been hoisted by its own petard: 鈥淭he insult [dank meme] is every bit as memetic as the target it鈥檚 applied to. 鈥楳emes are dead鈥� is thus a well-worn meme itself.鈥�

Spreading in 2014鈥�15, the term dank meme rose to mainstream prominence with a Facebook Group, Bernie Sanders鈥� Dank Meme Stash, which churned out memes supporting Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders during the 2016 US presidential election (internet users frequently refer to a collection of dank memes as dank meme stashes). In May 2016, an Australian journalist drily defined dank meme on a broadcast, much to the meta-delight of many internet users.

The dank in dank meme is an ironic use of the slang term dank. According to lexicographer Jonathon Green, black, campus, and drug slang began repurposing 诲补苍办鈥�which originally meant 鈥渦npleasantly moist or humid鈥濃�攁s 鈥渆xcellent鈥� or 鈥渇irst-rate,鈥� especially with reference to high-quality marijuana, in the 1980s. Dank meme stash, as we saw, additionally alludes to the marijuana sense of dank.

The surprising inversion of the word dank, though, has many precedents. Slang has transformed other negative words, like bad, sick, or wicked, into positive ones. But dank meme flips dank once again, now characterizing online content as wholly un-dank: 鈥減ass茅 or clich茅d,鈥� 鈥渙ut of touch,鈥� or 鈥渉aving missed the cultural Zeitgeist.鈥�

Still, as its irony wears off thanks to its own use, dank meme continues to evolve, referring to memes that are delightful, clever, or funny on account of their weirdness, obscurity, novelty, and idiosyncrasy. A constant engine behind dank meme, whether used negatively or positively, is content that hasn鈥檛 gone viral in the mainstream.