Internet Memes Trivia
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174 free Internet Memes trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free Internet Memes trivia questions with answers. Memes are the folklore of the internet, and this quiz tests how well you know the classics. Forty-five questions cover Rickrolling and the Macy's parade, Doge and Dogecoin, Grumpy Cat's real name, the stock photo behind Distracted Boyfriend, the dress that split the world in 2015, Harlem Shake, Nyan Cat, Success Kid, Pepe, Leeroy Jenkins, Kilroy from World War II and the biologist who invented the word 'meme' in 1976. Easy questions ask which song a rickroll plays and what breed of dog Doge is; the hard ones want the Scottish island behind the dress, the year Keyboard Cat was filmed and which webcomic gave us 'This is fine'. Perfect for group chats, office quizzes and anyone who has spent too long online. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on each meme, and each question shows the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 174 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who coined the word 'meme' in 1976, decades before the internet adopted it?
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins coined 'meme' in The Selfish Gene (1976): he trimmed 'mimeme', built on the Greek for 'imitate', because he wanted a one-syllable word that sounds like 'gene'.
Q 02A GIF of which Simpsons character backing slowly into a hedge is used online to show embarrassment?
Homer Simpson
Homer Simpson sinks into the hedge in the 1994 episode 'Homer Loves Flanders': he pops out to invite his neighbours to spend the day with him, they say no, and he quietly reverses back into the leaves.
Q 03Godwin's law says the odds of a comparison to whom approach one as an online discussion grows?
Hitler or the Nazis
Hitler or the Nazis: lawyer Mike Godwin launched the 'law' on Usenet in 1990 as a deliberate counter-meme, hoping to shame people out of glib comparisons that trivialised the Holocaust.
Q 04A rickroll bait-and-switches you into the video for which 1987 Rick Astley hit?
Never Gonna Give You Up
Never Gonna Give You Up: the prank grew so big that fans flooded a 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards vote until Astley was named Best Act Ever, 21 years after the song came out.
Q 05Rick Astley took rickrolling mainstream by popping up to lip-sync at which 2008 event?
The Macy's Thanksgiving Parade
The Macy's Thanksgiving Parade: Astley popped up on the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends float and lip-synced his hit, rickrolling millions of live TV viewers in person.
Q 06In the 'Is this a pigeon?' meme, what is the anime character actually pointing at?
A butterfly
A butterfly: the puzzled man is Yutaro Katori, an android studying life on Earth in the 1991 anime The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird, which is why he gets the creature so wrong.
Q 07Doge captions are traditionally written in which font?
Comic Sans
Comic Sans suits a talking dog: Vincent Connare drew it in 1994 after seeing a cartoon dog in Microsoft Bob speak in formal Times New Roman and deciding dogs don't talk like that.
Q 08Which cryptocurrency launched in December 2013 as a joke based on a Shiba Inu meme?
Dogecoin
Dogecoin: Jackson Palmer tweeted a joke about 'investing in Dogecoin' before any such coin existed, then teamed up with programmer Billy Markus to launch a real one days later as a send-up of crypto hype.
Q 09What was Grumpy Cat's real name?
Tardar Sauce
Tardar Sauce turned her scowl into a career: a year after her first Reddit photos she was Friskies' official 'spokescat' and the winner of a lifetime achievement award at its cat video contest.
Q 10The 'Drakeposting' meme, in which Drake recoils from one thing and approves another, uses stills from which music video?
Hotline Bling
Hotline Bling: Drake's loose, much-parodied dance moves in the 2015 video were clipped into reaction images on 4chan, and two of the poses hardened into the internet's stock no-and-yes template.
Q 11The Dancing Baby, a 1996 animation demo that became an early viral loop, later danced through which TV series?
Ally McBeal
Ally McBeal: the baby began as a sample file bundled with 3D character-animation software and spread by email chain before turning up in 1998 as the young lawyer's recurring hallucination.
Q 12Nyan Cat flies through space with what for a body?
A Pop-Tart
A Pop-Tart: Chris Torres modelled the cat on his own pet, Marty, and gave it a pastry body after two viewers of his drawing livestream separately suggested a Pop-Tart and a cat.
Q 13The 2013 Harlem Shake craze was set to a track by which producer?
Baauer
Baauer's 2012 track 'Harlem Shake' powered thousands of uploads a day at the craze's peak, and Billboard's newly added YouTube-view counting sent it to number one on the Hot 100 in February 2013.
Q 21The 'This is fine' dog sitting in a burning room comes from which webcomic?
Gunshow
Gunshow: the meme crops the first two panels of KC Green's longer 2013 strip 'On Fire'; in the rest, the dog keeps reassuring himself while his body melts.
Q 22The house burning behind Disaster Girl was actually what?
A firefighter training exercise
A firefighter training exercise: the local fire department was burning the house as a drill when Dave Roth snapped his four-year-old; in 2021 Zoë sold the photo as an NFT for about $500,000 and paid off her student loans.
Q 23The girl in the 'Ermahgerd' meme is gleefully clutching which books?
Goosebumps books
Q 14The Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014 raised money to fight which condition?
ALS (motor neurone disease)
ALS (motor neurone disease): nominees had 24 hours to take the soaking or donate, and the $115 million raised in the US helped fund the 2016 discovery of a gene linked to the disease.
Q 15Which cartoonist created the green frog character from the 2005 comic Boy's Club that became a meme?
Matt Furie
Matt Furie drew the frog as an easygoing housemate in a slacker comic; in 2017, dismayed by what the internet had made of him, he published a strip showing the character's funeral.
Q 16The 2009 meme 'Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat' tacks the cat onto the end of which kind of clip?
Fail and blooper videos
Fail and blooper videos: Brad O'Farrell tacked Charlie Schmidt's 1984 home video onto a clip of someone tumbling off an escalator, so the cat seemed to play the victim offstage like a flopped stage act.
Q 17The 'Epic Handshake' meme of two muscular arms clasping comes from which 1987 action film?
Predator
Predator: Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch greets his old friend Dillon, played by Carl Weathers, with a clasp that turns into a mid-air arm-wrestle; captioned on each arm, it now stands for two sides agreeing.
Q 18The 'woman yelling at a cat' meme pairs a Real Housewives star with a cat named what?
Smudge
Smudge was photographed in Ottawa looking affronted by a plate of salad; the picture sat on Tumblr for nearly a year before a May 2019 tweet paired it with the shouting reality star.
Q 19Gangnam Style, the first YouTube video to reach a billion views, is named after a district of which city?
Seoul
Seoul: Gangnam is an affluent district of the South Korean capital, and 'Gangnam style' is Korean slang for the lavish, trend-setting lifestyle of the newly rich who live there.
Q 20The Bernie Sanders mittens meme came from a photo taken at which event?
Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration
Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration: two days after the photo of him sitting arms crossed in his winter jacket went viral, Sanders put it on a sweatshirt and sold it to raise money for Meals on Wheels.
Goosebumps books: the photo shows Maggie Goldenberger, dressed up for a game, clutching several of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps paperbacks; 'Ermahgerd' spells 'Oh my God' with a retainer lisp.
Q 24'Kilroy was here' graffiti became a worldwide meme during which conflict?
World War II
World War II: American GIs chalked the peeking, big-nosed doodle wherever they landed, and Stalin is said to have found it in his VIP bathroom at the 1945 Potsdam Conference and asked who Kilroy was.
Q 25What is the deliberately mangled grammar of 'I can has cheezburger' captions called?
Lolspeak
Lolspeak: the cat-caption dialect won such a following that volunteers on a wiki set about translating the whole Bible into it, verse by verse.
Q 26'All your base are belong to us' comes from the botched translation of which video game?
Zero Wing
Zero Wing: the garbled line sat in the intro of the shooter's European Mega Drive port for years, until a 2001 techno-remix video on Newgrounds turned it into an internet craze.
Q 27Leeroy Jenkins became famous for ruining a carefully planned raid in which game?
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft: the 2005 video shows Leeroy charging into Upper Blackrock Spire mid-plan; Blizzard later added him as an in-game character and a Hearthstone card.
Q 28Hide the Pain Harold, real name András Arató, is a stock-photo model from which country?
Hungary
Hungary: Arató found the memes by image-searching his own stock photos and at first wanted them stopped, then gave in because, as he put it, close one site and three new ones appear.
Q 29Gary Brolsma's 2004 'Numa Numa Dance' video had him lip-syncing to a song by which band?
O-Zone
O-Zone: the Moldovan trio's hit 'Dragostea din tei' gave the clip its name as well as its tune, because 'numa numa' is how the Romanian refrain 'nu mă, nu mă iei' sounds to English ears.
Q 30In real life, what colours was 'the dress' that divided the internet in 2015?
Blue and black
Blue and black: the dress photographed in February 2015 was a royal-blue lace dress with black trim; washed-out lighting in the photo led many to see white and gold instead.