Discredited Meme

$1 for a standard Monty Python reference, $2 for a Holy Grail reference: A must for Fantasy Tabletop Gamers.


I'd like to think there's a secret government prison camp for the type of person who sees 387 ripoffs of All Your Base and decides to make a 388th.
—Seanbaby

Any Meme that has fallen out of favor with pop culture, or at least the segment it was popular in. Either the meme was simply forgotten over time, it was one of many Notable Commercial Campaigns that got discontinued, it was associated with something that fell victim to changing politics, it was a Catch Phrase that got repeated too much, or something else.

Note this is not about whether the meme was any good or not. Most appealed to enough people in the first place to become memes. It's just that some aren't looked on too fondly after the fact. Until the Nostalgia Filter kicks in, some of these memes are Deader Than Disco. A meme appearing on any of the old media is generally considered its dying breath, at least to the internet-at-large.

Now the internet allows memes to propagate faster than ever, but then get discredited faster than ever, usually thanks to the repetition reason.

This can also use Hypocritical Humor, with someone complaining about a meme, but in the form of the meme.

Compare Discredited Trope, Dead Horse Trope, Never Heard That One Before, Seinfeld Is Unfunny, Popularity Polynomial, Defied Trope.

Contrast Cliché, which is what some luckier memes settle into.

Examples of Discredited Meme include:

In-Universe Examples Only!

Strong Bad: You Internet types ruined Trogdor! Just like you did zombies, pirates, ninjas and Strong Bad!

First Caveman: Why chicken cross road? Yuk yuk
Second Caveman: Hmph. That one old already.

  • One of The Simpsons Halloween specials has giant advertising mascots running amok. The solution was to start ignoring them as ads go away if no one watches them. "Like that old woman who couldn't find the beef?'" Lisa observes.
  • At one of his concerts, Dave Chappelle finally chewed out fans for endlessly repeating "I'm Rick James, Bitch!" from Chappelle's Show. At one point someone came up to him and said it while he was at Disneyland with his family! This is one of the bigger reasons for his Creator Breakdown.
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail has been quoted so much, it's now a joke to mock the fact that it's quoted so much.
    • Part of the lyrics of "White and Nerdy" by "Weird Al" Yankovic.
    • DM of the Rings had a strip where the players started quoting it. The author note stated the next Dungeons & Dragons edition should have the option to punish players for quoting the movie.
      • 7th Sea actually has this enshrined in the rules.
      • White Wolf's The World of Darkness games mention this in many of their Storyteller handbooks. In fact, they even tell you how to deal with a player who is an obsessive quoter.
    • Xkcd had an old strip encouraging Python fans to celebrate the group by making up their own surreal, Pythonesque jokes rather than endlessly parroting their lines.
    • An episode of Loading Ready Run's Commodore HUSTLE involved a D&D group with a "no Monty Python" rule.
    • Stolen Pixels #84: (a boomer zombie pukes) "I didn't think zombies knew Monty Python".
  • Zany VG Quotes's Zero Wing page says, "It's dead, Jim," and has a link to the infamous intro that simply says "Oh hell, you already know what this one is." At one point there was a snarky comment about it being time to stop wearing the AYB t-shirts and repeating it all the time. Notable because the entire All Your Base fad can be traced back to a Zany VG project.
  • In The Simpsons episode "Simpson Tide", Bart sings a portion of the song "Do the Bartman" and Ralph Wiggum comments that it "is so 1991".
    • Likewise, in the episode when he starts going to a Catholic school, he introduces himself by rattling off his old catchphrases in a very bored voice, ending in "yadda-yadda-yadda."
    • There is also an in-universe example: the episode in which Bart briefly gains fame on the Krusty the Klown Show as the 'I Didn't Do It Boy'.
  • According to Dork Tower, a meme is officially dead whenever Matt adopts it. The case in point that led to this observation? "All your base are belong to us!"
  • In Crash Bandicoot: Mind over Mutant, Cortex says over an intercom at one point "No, you can't haz cheezburger. It's a stupid meme anyway..."
  • The entire concept is embodied in a The Man Show sketch of their "Museum of Annoying Guys" (faux Latinate name: "Jokus Repeatus Shut the F Up-us"). "It's the beat a Catch Phrase to death guy."
  • According to the image and caption for Fauxtivational Poster, TV Tropes has declared Demotivators to be unnecessary.
  • It's been old hat since about the mid-1990s to observe that MTV doesn't play music videos anymore.
  • Portal's The Cake Is a Lie meme got discredited by the time the sequel rolled around, through massive overuse. The following media has mentioned that:
    • Cracked pretty much demonstrates how a meme gets discredited (using The Cake Is a Lie as an example).
    • Gamesradar was one of the first to declare this, and Valve agreed, stating in commentaries and interviews that they were so sick of it that they excluded it from Portal 2 for that very reason. They were unable to help themselves entirely, however, as there are two specific references in the game. One is in Rattman's mural depicting Chell's victory over GLaDOS and the other is Shmuck Bait that serves as a Take That from both GLaDOS to Chell and Valve to the player. There's also a bit of binary code in Chell's file in the "Lab Rat" tie-in comic that translates to "the cake is a lie".
    • Just in time for people to start referencing "Nicolas Cage Wants Cake" instead. Apparently it is a meme now.
    • Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation is similarly heartily sick of The Cake Is a Lie meme. He generally refers to it as a Portal reference, but it's always the same one. He's so sick of it that he completely trashed Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for just having the reference (In spite of other given reasons) long after the meme had stopped being funny. He also bashes anyone who dares to use the cake reference in their Web Comic for the same reason: "And if that doesn't work then just go on about the cake being a lie."
  • Survival of the Fittest: According to one of the administrators, Kenny the bear's appearance was done mainly to make people shut up about the "inactivity bear" meme.
  • KnowYourMeme, a website dedicated to...well, memes, has an upcoming dictionary term called "The Family Guy Effect." To wit: "When a popular Internet meme is mentioned on the show Family Guy, popularity of said meme will either have a temporary spike in popularity, or begin to decline." E.g. Chuck Norris? He's been unpopular a long time.
    • So the next time you watch Family Guy and see your favorite meme on it, weep for your fallen meme. WEEP.
    • Oddly enough, their use of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" may have been too early (depending on how long episodes take to produce) to have been a reference to Rickrolling.
  • The Nostalgia Critic admitted in his Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog review that his use of M. Bison exclaiming, "Of course!" in response to world domination plans was no longer funny. The clip has made a handful of NC-related appearances since then, but the buildup in each instance deviated from that past reviews (NC simply saying, "He has an evil plan to, you guessed it, take over the world") in order to make the gag less stale (eg, a character announces world domination plans himself, NC notices a character looks like M. Bison, or someone says "Of course").
    • In the commentary for the same video, he cited this trope as his reason for not including the famous "bad touch" clip, mentioning also that, really, it was good advice and it was pretty ballsy of the show to make it.
      • He also stated on his commentary for "Top 11 Batman the Animated Series Episodes" that he's really gotten sick of the "Bat Credit-Card" joke, to the point where if someone says it to him at a convention, he'll only respond once.
  • For an omnipresent meme, numerous sites have rules about not saying "First" in comments.
    • Fark has turned it into a new meme: its filter replaces "first (to) post" with "Boobies" and "first comment" with "Weeners", and if the post actually was first, adds twelve hours to its time stamp, thus pretty much guaranteeing it will be the minimum post (last post in Fark filter).
    • The Escapist, home of Zero Punctuation has a rule that comments in a thread about one of Yahtzee's videos are automatically deleted if they appear less than X minutes after the video is posted (X being the length of the video itself).
  • An in-universe example: Nodwick drove the new swearword "krutz" out of fashion by getting henchmen to adopt it en masse. A good thing, as a group of villains had created the new swearword as a means of accumulating mystical power.
  • Quotes from The Inbetweeners became so memetic in the UK that one of the lead actors, Simon Bird, got sick of them before the series ended its run.

Things gameshow audiences do not do: Shout out quotes from The Inbetweeners such as: Clunge. Bus Wankers. Football Friend. Right, that's all you're getting.

Sailor Venus: "Okay...no. Maybe there's enough underage kids here that you thought this was 4chan, but it's not and that shit hasn't been funny since 2007, anyway, so I don't even wanna hear it. Venus Meteor Shower!"

  • The Left 4 Dead custom map "I Hate Mountains" has some (custom-made) graffiti where someone asks "What Would Chuck Norris Do?" about the Zombie Apocalypse. After a couple of lines of banter, the exchange is ended with four words: "Seriously, he's fucking dead."
  • In a moment of Self-Deprecation, Little Kuriboh discredited his "Card Games On Motorcycles" meme by having Lector destroy it in order to demonstrate Jinzo's special ability. Lector then laughs and says "I've been waiting a whole year for that!"
    • He promoted the possibility of a Yu-Gi-Oh 5 Ds Abridged for charity, and specifically said that it won't involve the phrase.
      • This episode features Jack trying to find a new catchphrase. He's told that "he will be doubled his paycheck if he never says that phrase again."
  • Chuggaaconroy has completely disavowed Steve the Trooper, a red leaf Pikmin. Originally a throwaway gag, as Chugga often names characters, the fans picked up Steve and made fanart, videos, Facebook pages, and more. Throughout his Pikmin2 review, he has specifically avoided the name Steve, sometimes stating "You know what that Pikmin's name is". Still, most comments on his videos relate to Steve in some way.
  • This video is a Take That to arrow to the knee jokes.
  • On this very website, Candle Jack is loathed by some and loved by others.
    • Well, it's hard to love somebody that steals you away in the middle of every sen
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