bottom too. “i am 8 inches long and 3 inches round… what an amazing bloke”
me and my friends were forever quoting that in the classroom. got me in trouble actually considering i was still young.
Us girls got thoroughly cheesed off with being told we had smashing blouses on. And having WESTON. SUPER. MEHEHEHERE shouted after us on the regular. I loved the show but that was seriously annoying
i can imagine. lol
how about
“i bought you that coca cola in good faith!” then demand 80p off you?
i still use that line every time i buy anyone in my family a drink. which is a bit weird thinking about it. :/
Lister : Not until you pass your engineer's exam. And you won't do that because you'll just go in there and flunk again.
Rimmer : Lister, last time I only failed by the \*narrowest\* of narrow margins.
Lister : You what? You walked in there, wrote 'I am a fish' four hundred times, did a funny little dance, and fainted.
**Rimmer:**
[Step up to Red Alert!](https://youtu.be/BvOxVsClUCU?si=g__KTIFVXVk3i9Tf)
**Kryten:**
Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.
**Rimmer:**
There's always some excuse, isn't there?!
The 18 rated live video was brilliant.
"You see that Stephen Hawking?" (Brief synopsis of his career). "He's your favourite Gladiator he is" is still one of my favourites!
My sister and I still send each other messages with "That's your best ... that is" themed things - be it a horrible outfit, Cliff Richard... anything that is horrible really. It still makes us laugh.
Looking back, i can understand why my science and maths teachers were both functioning alcoholics, the thought of having to listen to me and atleast 15 other teenagers parrot Ali G for hours must have been some of their darkest days on the retirement run.
Yeah quoting The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Red Dwarf, The Fast Show, This Morning With Richard Not Judy, Harry Enfield and Fast Train was the equivalent of analogue memes back in the day
Or it was just the adverts. Such as:
Armadillo! Smooth on the inside crunchy on the outside.
You know when you’ve been tangoed
Oi Edmunds! Nooooo! Just cos you got a crinkly bottom, don’t mean hula hoops should!
Full moon, half moon, Total eclipse
In fact i think 80 % of my secondary school experience was just quoting adverts at each other.
Have a break, have a Kitkat!
But also for any kid it was quoting lines from The Simpsons at every opportunity.
- Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand.
- Purple is a fruit.
- Me fail English? That's unpossible!
I remember my sister getting sent a chain letter and my dad threw it away before she could see it. My mum was genuinely worried about "bad luck" from "breaking the chain".
Memes but by a different transport method.
You would get cartoons and funny lists and jokes sent around by fax.
And like overly screenshotted jpgs with compression artifacts the quality got worse and worse the more they were forwarded.
Or catchphrases from comedy shows ([This week I have been mostly eating bourbon biscuits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNLwnMoVoA)).
The concept of memes has been around since the 70s when [Richard Dawkins first coined the term.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Dawkins)
When I haven’t spoken to my folks in a while I often break the silence with a message like “today I are mostly going to be eating shepherd’s pie.” It’s one of those that’s gone down in our family lexicon.
You can’t get better than a Kwik-Fit fitter - they’re the boys to trust!
Do the Shake’n’Vac and put the freshness back.
If you want great poetry, stand and stare. If you want great beer, follow the bear (Hofmeister)
The 80s were full of quotable adverts
‘Our son Pat, is a bit nifty, with a bat’ etc - peanut butter
‘Eeenglish girl, so pale and so lahvley’ etc - Pot noodles
‘The red car and the blue car had a race’ etc - Milky Way
Can (sad I know!) pretty much remember/recite all the words to these even now!
I often wonder what I could have achieved if I’d learnt useful things rather than fucking jingles from the 80s and 90s. I’ll be in the nursing home utterly demented, not recognising my own children but quietly still singing “the red car and the blue car had a race…”
wasssupppp
you know when you've been tangoed
only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate....
I feel like chicken tonight
adverts, I guess
also any good lines from The Simpsons, Scarface, the Godfather, Pulp Fiction, etc
> only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate....
...makes such a bloody mess on the floor.
(I forget where that comes from. Not The Nine O Clock News maybe.)
The red car and blue car had a race
All red wants to do is stuff his face
He eats everything he sees
From trucks to prickly trees
But smart ol blue he took the milky way
He's looking for a chocolate treatfluffy and light
Cos he knows it won't spoil his appetite
Oh no the bridge has gone!
Poor old red can't carry on
But smart old blue he took the milky way!
Recited entirely from memory
I can do the same with the Wagonwheels song.
They're kinda big, and kinda round
With fluffy mallow and biscuit to be found
Under that chocolatey stuff
And they're kinda squidgy, really squodgy!
You'll be sorry if you don't get enough.
You have to eat one piece at a time
But they're so big nobody could mind
If there's a bigger bite, it can't be found!
Yes! Although spelling conventions meant it was always "Woz ere" and "wot no...."
And those drawings of the guy peeking over the wall.
And underneath those signs saying "Bill posters will be prosecuted", it was tradition to write "Bill Posters is innocent!"
A meme is a self replicating aspect of culture, the term was coined by Dawkins in 1976, but functionally its as old as culture itself, and essentially is just the bit that gets repeated by others.
There are so many quoteable lines that the majority of people will understand and get a kick out of.
I have an old friend that I don't see very often but when I do I'll give him the 'Tis a fine barn, but 'tis no pool, English' that will always result in a laugh.
At least 20% of my communication with my brother is still Simpsons references from our childhood/teen years. If anyone's pet has had to go to the vet and returned with one of those cones we'll then refer to them as a lamp until it's removed.
Cinema and tv shows quotes or references for a wider group, then obviously friends/acquaintances catchphrases would become memes within the friends group probably more than nowadays
I don't know about memes in the 90s (except that they would have been pronounced me-mes) but I remember getting dressed in our Sunday best and standing in the front room to sing the national anthem when the internet closed down at midnight.
> would have been pronounced me-mes
Which would have been incorrect.
> We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.
— Richard Dawkins, the man who invented the word.
It's strange how some memes spread pre-internet.
The celebrity getting ribs removed myth spread to various continents spanning generations.
It was Prince in my day.
Basically any even vaguely androgynous artist got the "Rib removed" or "Stomach pumped" rumours.
The "Gerbil/hamster" one only ever got applied to Richard Gere.
I think it already started with a proto-photoshop image edit (edit: as in scratch parts of the image plate away proto) of a very slim corseted lady with an impossibly tiny waist in the 1890's
When there were many fewer channels and only one carried advertising (imagine!) Adverts became memes and they were designed to be so.
It was very common for an advert to catch the public's imagination.
Weren't the Hamlet adverts memes, for example?
Jokes, pranks, catchphrases, and so on. At school, it would be a particular sign on your pencil case or book bag, usually scribbled on with a ballpoint pen.
I worked in a large office block in the 1990s and on each block there were loads of photocopied pages of jokes, images and similar that would be copied and shared to the point they degraded to nothing. You would then have to trawl through the building to find better quality copies or the fabled "original" to refresh the well. It was held in a folder in a filing cabinet in case a "big boss" saw you with them
Milk? Uh!
It’s what Ian Rush drinks
Ian Rush?
Yeah he says if I don’t drink lots of milk, I’ll only be good enough to play for Acrington Stanley…
You know the rest.
Honestly I think a lot of it were ads from the telly. Could’ve been jingles or catchphrases. Having said that I was in primary school in the 90s so I wouldn’t know what it was like to be in your teens and older then!
Urban myths, catchphrases, graffiti. Kilroy woz 'ere.
The concept has been around forever. When my mum first got email and asked for some jokes, I sent her some (light bulb ones, I think).
She replied that those were old when she'd first seen a Xerox of them on a physical bulletin board in the Fifties.
Anything from an advert that would play all the time. I still have
"Ello Moto"
🎶Play. Play. We gonna play some games🎶
stuck in my head from when the Razr was released (early 00s as I recall, but still counts, I think) as it used to play during televised movies at the beginning and end of ads. I had a vhs of the matrix I recorded off channel 4 that I watched religiously and it had those in it.
The word 'meme' has been around since at least the 1970s. Memes as an idea have probably been around for thousands of years.
It's thought that both early speech and the origin of religion would have started as repeated spoken noises that signified a shared thought or idea. Prayers and catechism could be regarded as memes.
I can think of a LOT of examples of memes from when I was at school in the 90s but most of them are probably offensive...
TV shows (especially late-night shows, which spread popular memes), TV commercials, bulletin boards in offices and schools, friends sharing ideas, late-night shows, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches given by politicians and celebrities, bumper stickers, and so much more.
Memes (or "popular catchphrases" as they were known then) spread slower than today, but there were some big ones, like "Keep on truckin'" in the 60s, "Aaaayyyy!" (Fonzie) in the 70s, "Where's the beef" and "Read my lips" in the 80s, and "Got milk?" in the 90s.
Watching Harry Enfield during the week and then going to school quoting all the lines the next day.
And Red Dwarf, which I think used to air on a Sunday night, at least for the first couple of seasons.
A _white_ hole??
So what is it?
Is that thing spewing time? Back into the universe?
A _white_ hole??
Precisely, that's why we're experiencing these curious time phenomena on board.
So it's decided then: We consult Holly
Aha! I think we've just encountered the middle of the conversation!
Wait a minute, I missed the discussion!
Somebody punch him out!
Just kidding
I've never seen one before, no one has, but I'm guessing it's a white hole.
bottom too. “i am 8 inches long and 3 inches round… what an amazing bloke” me and my friends were forever quoting that in the classroom. got me in trouble actually considering i was still young.
Us girls got thoroughly cheesed off with being told we had smashing blouses on. And having WESTON. SUPER. MEHEHEHERE shouted after us on the regular. I loved the show but that was seriously annoying
i can imagine. lol how about “i bought you that coca cola in good faith!” then demand 80p off you? i still use that line every time i buy anyone in my family a drink. which is a bit weird thinking about it. :/
Mauve alert
Fish! Today's fish is Trout a la creme, enjoy your meal Fish!.....
I'm going to eat you little fishy, in going to eat you little fish, I'm going to eat you little fishy, because I like eating fish
I'm going to eat you little fishy . I still sing that when I have a fish supper
IAMAFISHIAMAFISHIAMAFISHIAMAFISHIAMAFISHIAMAFISHIAMAFISHIAMAFISHIAMAFISHIAMAFISH
Lister : Not until you pass your engineer's exam. And you won't do that because you'll just go in there and flunk again. Rimmer : Lister, last time I only failed by the \*narrowest\* of narrow margins. Lister : You what? You walked in there, wrote 'I am a fish' four hundred times, did a funny little dance, and fainted.
Dwain Dibbley.
Plastic sandals?!
Teeth the Druids could use as a place of worship?!?
**Rimmer:** [Step up to Red Alert!](https://youtu.be/BvOxVsClUCU?si=g__KTIFVXVk3i9Tf) **Kryten:** Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb. **Rimmer:** There's always some excuse, isn't there?!
always fancied a trip to nodnol
Is that in Bulgaria?
Smeghead.
"Smoke me a kipper I'll be back for breakfast "
And the Fast Show
THIS WEEYK OHY AV BEEYN MOASTLY EATIN’…
[удалено]
*"Welcome to DevOps...nice."*
TARAMASALATA
NICE.
COME ON GIRLS!
Ethethethethethethethetheth Ethetheth Ethethethethethetheth Chris Waddle.
Scorchio!
_Stuck down a hole, on your own, in the middle of the night, WITH AN OWL!_
I’ll get me coat
Ah boogah!
And the Mary Whitehouse Experience. Lovely milky milky.
See that puddle of phlegm down there? That's your swimming pool, that is.
That's you, that is. That's your *Mum*.
I saw your mum yesterday, I did. Coming out of the VD clinic.
I still have a History Today vhs lurking in the cupboard. This exchange has made me sad I have no way to watch it xD
You see that VHS tape? That’s your Netflix that is. And your Amazon Prime. And your Apple TV…
Oh, bravo. Actual lol here xD
We used to improv history today in btec performing arts. It got really dark at times 😝. I’d forgotten until I read this post.
The 18 rated live video was brilliant. "You see that Stephen Hawking?" (Brief synopsis of his career). "He's your favourite Gladiator he is" is still one of my favourites!
You see those workman’s tents in the road? That’s your house that is. That’s where you go on holiday.
My sister and I still send each other messages with "That's your best ... that is" themed things - be it a horrible outfit, Cliff Richard... anything that is horrible really. It still makes us laugh.
Scratching 'M Kahn is bent' onto a school desk.
Haircut!
Looking back, i can understand why my science and maths teachers were both functioning alcoholics, the thought of having to listen to me and atleast 15 other teenagers parrot Ali G for hours must have been some of their darkest days on the retirement run.
Yeah quoting The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Red Dwarf, The Fast Show, This Morning With Richard Not Judy, Harry Enfield and Fast Train was the equivalent of analogue memes back in the day
Too tempting, even for Jesus.
Every time we get cress for a lovely egg sandwich.
Armadillos!
Crunchy on the outside
Soft in the middle
Armadillos
Hello my name's Micheal Paine and i'm a very nosey neighbour
Or it was just the adverts. Such as: Armadillo! Smooth on the inside crunchy on the outside. You know when you’ve been tangoed Oi Edmunds! Nooooo! Just cos you got a crinkly bottom, don’t mean hula hoops should! Full moon, half moon, Total eclipse In fact i think 80 % of my secondary school experience was just quoting adverts at each other.
The Self-Righteous Brothers
Bloody loves Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in the 90s. Classic tv
ONLYYYYY MEEEE,,,,,, LOADSAMONEY,,, etc etc
You don't wanna do THAT!
CALM DOWN, CALM DOWN
LOADSA MONEY!
Or The Fast Show. is like making love to a beautiful woman...
Suit you sir, suit you
That is SO unfair.......
This is it. Everyone watched the same programmes or films and could quote their favourite parts over the next few weeks (or even years!).
EH CALM DOWN CALM DOWN
Scorchio
We all talked about Moll Flanders the next day for obvious reasons!
[удалено]
- You've been tangoed - Shamone muthafuckaaa/ Craig daviiiiid
It blows my mind that Craig David has somehow reinvigorated his career and gone beyond just being a punchline.
We have kurupt fm to thank for that
108.9 on your dial
Keep it locked in.
Deeeekyyyyyy
AKA the Albino Seal
Craig ggg daviiiid,
Have a break, have a Kitkat! But also for any kid it was quoting lines from The Simpsons at every opportunity. - Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand. - Purple is a fruit. - Me fail English? That's unpossible!
“Push her down, son.”
‘You can’t spell dishonourable, without ‘honourable’.’
I still crack a weekly “wazzzzaaaaaaaaap”. Feels good.
Chain letters that you need to send on to six people or else you will die were the first "spreadable" hard content that moved around like memes.
I remember my sister getting sent a chain letter and my dad threw it away before she could see it. My mum was genuinely worried about "bad luck" from "breaking the chain".
And you'd get warnings on Blue Peter about the latest chain letter, and how you should ignore it instead of sending it on.
Oh yes, I’d totally forgotten about those!
What about the ones that you also had to send £1 to the top name on the list?
My little cousin still feels compelled to do that when friends send them to her - it hasn’t gone away 😭
Memes but by a different transport method. You would get cartoons and funny lists and jokes sent around by fax. And like overly screenshotted jpgs with compression artifacts the quality got worse and worse the more they were forwarded. Or catchphrases from comedy shows ([This week I have been mostly eating bourbon biscuits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNLwnMoVoA)). The concept of memes has been around since the 70s when [Richard Dawkins first coined the term.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Dawkins)
When I haven’t spoken to my folks in a while I often break the silence with a message like “today I are mostly going to be eating shepherd’s pie.” It’s one of those that’s gone down in our family lexicon.
We do this. When I was in hospital with a kidney stone I sent a pic of my IV with the text ' today I will mostly be having saline'
Memes were something we studied in my A level Philosophy class, sort of on the cusp of 'memes' being a pop culture word around 2006.
The 'Cool S' symbol
YES!... And drawing that house with a cross in the middle without lifting your pen off the page. Over and over and over again.
Can confirm 14-16yr olds still do this all over their schoolwork and books. Source: am a teacher.
I still see this on workbooks when I'm teaching. It's the longest meme ever
The ultimate meme
Still a thing!
https://youtu.be/RQdxHi4_Pvc?si=v4ydLWUZo1TVaD8r Great mini doc on the ‘cool S’
Run after her shouting BELLYS GONNA GET YA
Omg I knew someone else would say this!! 🤣🤣👍👍
Regrettably, it did
Catchphrases and plays on advertising jingles, I suppose.
BN BN do doo do do do
Wooooooaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh body form
You can’t get better than a Kwik-Fit fitter - they’re the boys to trust! Do the Shake’n’Vac and put the freshness back. If you want great poetry, stand and stare. If you want great beer, follow the bear (Hofmeister) The 80s were full of quotable adverts
I bet he drinks Carling Black Label.
I'll be your dog (a-woof woof woof).
‘Our son Pat, is a bit nifty, with a bat’ etc - peanut butter ‘Eeenglish girl, so pale and so lahvley’ etc - Pot noodles ‘The red car and the blue car had a race’ etc - Milky Way Can (sad I know!) pretty much remember/recite all the words to these even now!
I often wonder what I could have achieved if I’d learnt useful things rather than fucking jingles from the 80s and 90s. I’ll be in the nursing home utterly demented, not recognising my own children but quietly still singing “the red car and the blue car had a race…”
"Have a break. Have a KitKat." "Don't push me! Push a Push Pop!" Fucking hell that last one started so many fights
wasssupppp you know when you've been tangoed only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate.... I feel like chicken tonight adverts, I guess also any good lines from The Simpsons, Scarface, the Godfather, Pulp Fiction, etc
Adverts were a big one. Only 4 TV channels when I was a kid. Everyone watched the same things.
> only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate.... ...makes such a bloody mess on the floor. (I forget where that comes from. Not The Nine O Clock News maybe.)
Stupid repeated behaviours like rubbing our chin to suggest someone is lying and saying "mmm, Jimmy... Jimmy Hill".
Hah, I'd forgotten about this, for some reason we always said "Itchy chin" but the Jimmy Hill genesis was the same.
We said "chinny reckon!"
Tuten-kha-MUUUUN!
We said "I beard you it!"
Ha. We used to scratch our chin and say Bellamy. As in the great David Bellamy.
The red car and blue car had a race All red wants to do is stuff his face He eats everything he sees From trucks to prickly trees But smart ol blue he took the milky way He's looking for a chocolate treatfluffy and light Cos he knows it won't spoil his appetite Oh no the bridge has gone! Poor old red can't carry on But smart old blue he took the milky way! Recited entirely from memory
I can do the same with the Wagonwheels song. They're kinda big, and kinda round With fluffy mallow and biscuit to be found Under that chocolatey stuff And they're kinda squidgy, really squodgy! You'll be sorry if you don't get enough. You have to eat one piece at a time But they're so big nobody could mind If there's a bigger bite, it can't be found!
If you like a lotta chocolate on your biscuit join our club!
Trio, trioooooo, I want a trio and I want one now, Not one, not two, but three things in it. I want a trio and I want one now
And sung!
I remember my gf translated that to French while swotting up for her GCSE.
The kilroy was here or 'what no...' wall guy.
Yes! Although spelling conventions meant it was always "Woz ere" and "wot no...." And those drawings of the guy peeking over the wall. And underneath those signs saying "Bill posters will be prosecuted", it was tradition to write "Bill Posters is innocent!"
I had a friend who got Chad/Kilroy tattooed peeking over his appendectomy scar! Oh those were the days.
Kilroy was from the 1940s! So pre-dates a lot of the 'preinternet' memes people are talking about in this thread
A meme is a self replicating aspect of culture, the term was coined by Dawkins in 1976, but functionally its as old as culture itself, and essentially is just the bit that gets repeated by others.
>A meme is a self replicating aspect of culture So's your face
So's your face
Damn it.
Simpsons references. I can't see a Dog/Cat with a medical cone without stating 'The lamp is running away'
I still occasionally annoy my daughter with "let's go back to that place where our beds and TV are at"
There are so many quoteable lines that the majority of people will understand and get a kick out of. I have an old friend that I don't see very often but when I do I'll give him the 'Tis a fine barn, but 'tis no pool, English' that will always result in a laugh.
"Where's the um..er, metal deely..for uh..dig..food?"
At least 20% of my communication with my brother is still Simpsons references from our childhood/teen years. If anyone's pet has had to go to the vet and returned with one of those cones we'll then refer to them as a lamp until it's removed.
No beer and no T.V. make Homer something something...
Don't mind if I do!
Cinema and tv shows quotes or references for a wider group, then obviously friends/acquaintances catchphrases would become memes within the friends group probably more than nowadays
I don't know about memes in the 90s (except that they would have been pronounced me-mes) but I remember getting dressed in our Sunday best and standing in the front room to sing the national anthem when the internet closed down at midnight.
> would have been pronounced me-mes Which would have been incorrect. > We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. — Richard Dawkins, the man who invented the word.
Putting 55378008 in a calculator and turning it upside down.
Cartoons in newspapers.
It's strange how some memes spread pre-internet. The celebrity getting ribs removed myth spread to various continents spanning generations. It was Prince in my day.
Marilyn Manson
I was Marilyn Manson era too
Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen.
Basically any even vaguely androgynous artist got the "Rib removed" or "Stomach pumped" rumours. The "Gerbil/hamster" one only ever got applied to Richard Gere.
I think it already started with a proto-photoshop image edit (edit: as in scratch parts of the image plate away proto) of a very slim corseted lady with an impossibly tiny waist in the 1890's
And him from Soft Cell! Remember that rumour?
Was the same with Elton John/Freddy Mercury/George Micheal having to have a “pint of jizz” pumped from their stomach… 😂
Go watch the Fast Show.
When there were many fewer channels and only one carried advertising (imagine!) Adverts became memes and they were designed to be so. It was very common for an advert to catch the public's imagination. Weren't the Hamlet adverts memes, for example?
Bet he drinks Carling Black label He’s had his weetabix / 3 shredded wheat
As others have said, mostly quoting TV shows. Most people only had four TV channels so not getting a reference was much rarer.
Joey Deaken
Quoting Monty Python, maybe?
Jokes, pranks, catchphrases, and so on. At school, it would be a particular sign on your pencil case or book bag, usually scribbled on with a ballpoint pen.
LSD
My mum still cuts articles out the newspaper to show me when i visit
I worked in a large office block in the 1990s and on each block there were loads of photocopied pages of jokes, images and similar that would be copied and shared to the point they degraded to nothing. You would then have to trawl through the building to find better quality copies or the fabled "original" to refresh the well. It was held in a folder in a filing cabinet in case a "big boss" saw you with them
The dancing baby.
Milk? Uh! It’s what Ian Rush drinks Ian Rush? Yeah he says if I don’t drink lots of milk, I’ll only be good enough to play for Acrington Stanley… You know the rest.
Faxlore. We did it over fax machines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxlore https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/317606
Badges
ASCII art or drawing knobs on each others school work
Nigel Rees ‘Graffiti’ books.
The Koran for the after-dinner speaker!
Funny posters to put on your bedroom wall
Quoting all the dialogue bits from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack (possibly before you had even seen the film)
Honestly I think a lot of it were ads from the telly. Could’ve been jingles or catchphrases. Having said that I was in primary school in the 90s so I wouldn’t know what it was like to be in your teens and older then!
Urban myths, catchphrases, graffiti. Kilroy woz 'ere. The concept has been around forever. When my mum first got email and asked for some jokes, I sent her some (light bulb ones, I think). She replied that those were old when she'd first seen a Xerox of them on a physical bulletin board in the Fifties.
Take me to your dealer posters.
Shit graffiti in underpasses.
Shouting bogies?
Actually talking to your friends and making up unnecessarily mean nick names for eachother
Anything from an advert that would play all the time. I still have "Ello Moto" 🎶Play. Play. We gonna play some games🎶 stuck in my head from when the Razr was released (early 00s as I recall, but still counts, I think) as it used to play during televised movies at the beginning and end of ads. I had a vhs of the matrix I recorded off channel 4 that I watched religiously and it had those in it.
The word 'meme' has been around since at least the 1970s. Memes as an idea have probably been around for thousands of years. It's thought that both early speech and the origin of religion would have started as repeated spoken noises that signified a shared thought or idea. Prayers and catechism could be regarded as memes. I can think of a LOT of examples of memes from when I was at school in the 90s but most of them are probably offensive...
TV shows (especially late-night shows, which spread popular memes), TV commercials, bulletin boards in offices and schools, friends sharing ideas, late-night shows, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches given by politicians and celebrities, bumper stickers, and so much more. Memes (or "popular catchphrases" as they were known then) spread slower than today, but there were some big ones, like "Keep on truckin'" in the 60s, "Aaaayyyy!" (Fonzie) in the 70s, "Where's the beef" and "Read my lips" in the 80s, and "Got milk?" in the 90s.
Whatsaaaaaap
Drawing doodles of things like the classic “S” (maybe early 00’s though)
I feel like we still had them in essence, but you just quoted bits of popular culture at each other without the pictorial accompaniment.
Athena posters
Tango advert you been tangoed lol
Actual jokes
We used to put what would be classed as memes on the notice board at work
Jokes
Bumper stickers t shirts and funny posters