Were you ever in a situation when your friend just made a dumb decision or said something really stupid in the group chat, but no words seemed to constitute an appropriate response?
I have had a meme folder in my phone for years now. The Tom Cruise laughing shoe meme is my personal favorite to whip out when chatting with my friends. It's got the perfect balance of irony, absurdity, and pop culture reference, and is a great response to someone acting dumb.
Today, we're featuring a selection of reaction memes from the just reaction pics Facebook group for you to save to your meme folders, Pandas. Is your friend acting like an insufferable clown? Let them know it by dropping one of these in the chat!
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
How we communicate on the Internet changes at super high speeds. It seems like only yesterday smileys and emojis were the main mode of communication. And those who didn't use them we called boomers. Then GIFs became popular and prompted the subtle art of reacting to what your friends said and did with the right amount of irony and pop culture reference.
Today, emojis and GIFs seem so 2010s, right? So, we send memes to represent our reactions most accurately. That's why groups like just reaction pics can be treasure troves of reaction memes for all occasions: confusion, ridicule, and even feeling emotional about something.
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
Reaction memes and images are by no means a new phenomenon. Many credit the facepalm as one of the first reaction faces, and its first recorded instance was apparently in 2004. In 2010, someone created a site MyFaceWhen.com with an array of different reaction pics and GIFs. Similar pages and groups on Tumblr and Facebook followed.
In 2014, New York City's Museum of the Moving Image even had an exhibit dedicated to GIFs. Titled "The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture," it featured the most popular and most often used reaction GIFs. The curator of the installation even posted a message on Reddit, asking users to share the GIFs they consider to be classics.
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
In 2019, The Washington Post attempted to rank the 24 most important viral reactions on the Internet in the past 20 years. And while none of the entries featured clowns (sadly), they did feature some classics. For example, the popcorn meme was in first place, with "This is fine" and the blinking guy meme holding ranks in the top 10.
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
But today, we're giving the spotlight to the clown reaction memes. How did they become a thing? And why do we associate the noble clown profession with acting foolish? According to Savannah Walsh at Elle, it was the insult of the year in 2020. She writes how the trend reached its culmination during a U.S. presidential debate during which Biden referred to Trump as "this clown."
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Image credits: just reaction pics
#14
Image credits: clown_certification
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Image credits: reaccmemes
According to Know Your Meme, in 2019, putting on clown makeup gained a not-so-literal meaning online. They write how a person putting on clown attire meant they were "making an increasingly larger fool of [themselves] by providing arguments which are deemed increasingly weak or illogical."
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Image credits: just reaction pics
A TikTok trend then cemented this description, when people started posting videos of themselves where they would tell embarrassing stories under the tag "Becoming A Clown Because People Keep Clowning Me." The videos often featured people putting on clown makeup, colorful clown wigs, or even dressing up as clowns.
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
There's not much context behind the clown reaction memes. You don't even need to know who Pennywise is or need to have watched an episode of Spongebob to enjoy these memes. While memes often require a certain level of knowledge of the Internet culture, the case with reaction memes is not always so.
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
Reaction memes actually don't require all involved to have fluency in pop culture or the meme culture itself. Mark Serrels writes for CNet how his kids know about memes such as the Rickroll and "My Name Is Jeff" even if they don't know the context. The kids' relationship with memes is entirely different from that of ours or Gen Z.
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Image credits: clown_certification
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
"They don't consume memes like us, they don't talk about memes like us," Serrels writes about his 7 and 10-year-old. 'They don't even think about them in the same way." He explains that kids these days get exposed to memes the old-fashioned way: on the playground.
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Image credits: just reaction pics
"They're consumed by osmosis, via a family member or YouTube streamer, then rapidly co-opted", Serrels writes. He says that's why his kids randomly shout "Mah Name Jeff" or "Succulent Chinese meal!" at inappropriate times. "Quickly they become part of a bizarre shared language. Nonsensical words that are simply shouted on the playground yet make no literal sense."
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
#40
Image credits: reaccmemes
#41
Image credits: clown_certification
#42
Image credits: The Memes Archive
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: just reaction pics
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Image credits: clown_certification
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Image credits: just reaction pics
