These are the best Montreal memes right now

Best Montreal memes

Such is how the Internet works: the day after Denis Coderre won the mayoral election, a select few online were discussing not the results of the previous night’s vote, but were creating Coderring — that is, photographing themselves with crooked smiles, making ballot-inserting poses, in an effort to mirror a photo of our new mayor captured by La Presse. 

It was a two-alarm meme at best — there weren’t too many people doing it before local media picked up on it, and I doubt you give much of a shit about it today — but it capped off a weekend where Montreal made real meme history, in the form of a fireball travelling across a power line, shot in Lachine by Huw Griffiths. That video (horizontal next time, Huw!) has been viewed an astonishing 3.5 million times since Nov. 1, and has been featured on news programs around the world in frivolous “you gotta see this” sorts of segments.

It’s been an exciting year for Montreal memes, which unofficially kicked off last December when Centre NAD 3D Animation and Digital Design students put a video on YouTube of an eagle snatching a baby on Mount Royal. Of course, the video turned out to be a well-constructed fake, but it’s been viewed over 40 million times, and it looked good enough to trick most people.

The Values Charter remains a hot-button issue, but when it comes to stoking social media flames, the PQ got it right with their eminently lampoonable graphics depicting the do’s and don’ts of a secular Quebec. After the brochure started making the rounds (both by snail mail and online), people went to town on their Twitter avatars, adding oversized crosses, turbans and veils to voice their displeasure with the charter and point out how ridiculous the pictures looked.

Montreal Events

The STM remains a fertile source of things to laugh at, and there’s a Facebook page devoted to STM-related silliness. Additionally, pictures of the city’s ever-changing and always confusing street signs are usually quite popular when they make the rounds, especially this four-pronged assault on the senses.

In a league rife with laughable situations, the one Habs meme with some legs is the one-note Therrien’s Temper Twitter feed, honouring our ornery coach.

I’m surprised meteorological Nostradamus Frankie MacDonald’s spot-on warning about an impending storm this past July didn’t take off, and considering my tap water is coming in a slight jaundiced hue these days, the failure of the layered Yol’eau gag is a bit of a shocker.

Outside of #manifencours for a spell last summer, Montreal hasn’t had much success with memorable hashtags. Our city editor was partial to #anglojewmayor during the short-lived Michael Applebaum administration.

None of these current memes perhaps match our city’s previous watermarks: the Mon père est riche kid, the Pas le temps de niaiser clubgoer and, if we go back really far in time, the Star Wars Kid (though he’s from Trois-Rivières, officially). And let’s not forget Pastagate. But in these divisive times, it’s reassuring to know that in the online universe, we’re all laughing or gawking at the same shit. ■

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