There are literally millions of memes out there – many start small, picking up a modest amount of upvotes, likes, or shares on a social media platform, with the lucky few going viral and spreading to a worldwide audience and even entering common online parlance.

Below are our favorite funny memes that incorporate sunglasses – and their origin stories.

Yellow Glasses Guy Meme

This now-famous meme began life in 2018 when it started to be used as a reaction image – it’s a blurry photo of a man wearing a pair of yellow glasses. The image was originally posted by the musician Muyi Fre$co on Twitter to accompany a joke – the picture is of himself. The image racked up over two thousand retweets and six thousand likes in a single year.

Shortly after the original image was posted, the actress Asia Jackson used the image in a tweet commenting on the Nike campaign of the time. This tweet achieved over 41,500 retweets and a further 120,000 likes, again increasing the visibility and popularity of the image.

By 2019 the man with yellow sunglasses photo was being used both as a reaction image and as part of memes on various platforms, including Reddit, mainly to demonstrate when someone is feeling lucky or super happy.

Deal with It Meme

This image, often used as a reaction or part of a meme, features a smug-looking cartoon dog wearing sunglasses and regularly resurfaces online, despite having originated over twenty years ago. The image started as a GIF that used a real-life photo of a brown dog, over which was superimposed a black pair of shades that dropped into place. In time, a cartoon version of the dog became popular and has largely stuck.

Over the years, this dog-wearing-sunglasses meme has popped up again and again – there was a huge spike in internet searches relating to it in 2007, following the release of the song, Deal with It, by Corbin Bleu, from the movie High School Musical.

Words Can’t Hurt Me, These Shades Are Gucci Meme

This meme takes as its basis an original image from the anime show Yu Yu Hakusho, released all the way back in 1992. The image features the main character, Yusuke Urameshi, strolling down a street wearing a pair of cool sunglasses.

The Tumblr blog yuyufashion posted a screenshot of the character along with the phrase, ‘Words can’t hurt me, my shades are Gucci’ in April 2015, and the upload quickly racked up over 293,000 notes. The image quickly spread and was soon being used in a wide variety of memes – many users took to their social media platforms to recreate the now-iconic meme by taking selfies of themselves in the same pose as in the original, wearing their favorite pair of shades.

Texts from Hillary Meme

Originating on Tumblr in 2015, this meme features an image of Hillary Clinton wearing sunglasses, sitting on a military aircraft, and looking at a cell phone with a stern expression – the text ‘this is Hillary’ often accompanies the picture. The photo was originally taken in 2011 and featured as part of various news coverage at the time.

Soon afterward, the photo was used as a meme on Tumblr and received over nine thousand notes within the first forty-eight hours of being uploaded and subsequently went viral on Facebook. A number of variations on the original meme soon emerged, incorporating text including ‘Sorry, Condi, I haven’t seen them’ and ‘It’s Madam Secretary.’

Matrix Morpheus Meme

A meme classic: a close-up picture of Morpheus from The Matrix, wearing his trademark rimless shades with small round lenses and the words, ‘What if I told you’ at the top of the screen. There are loads of hilarious variations, with phrases at the bottom of the screen including ‘the side with the USB symbol will always be the top side,’ ‘pressing A and B doesn’t help you catch a Pokemon,’ and ‘the resources are not real’ still generating plenty of shares and likes.

The meme began life in 2012 on Reddit as Cat Morpheus – a black-and-white photo of a cat wearing Morpheus sunglasses with the same text.

You Have Entered the Comedy Area Meme

With an image of Mario from Mario Kart wearing sunglasses (that have been obviously poorly superimposed onto the original character) and the text ‘You have entered the comedy area,’ this meme is often used in reference to bad jokes – especially ‘dad’ jokes. It first surfaced in 2019 on Reddit and gained 3,600 upvotes in three weeks.

Just a week later, the meme was reposted, this time achieving over 41,600 upvotes in a fortnight and spread quickly from there.

John Lemon Meme

And last on our list – this meme is exactly what you imagine: an image of a lemon wearing the small round spectacles popularized by John Lennon. The meme first emerged on Tumbler in 2011, and in January 2012, it was reposted with the caption: ‘Imagine all the citrus.’ This captured the public’s imagination; within five years, it had racked up over 63,000 views and received more than 3,800 upvotes.

This meme prompted a slew of variations on the theme, all involving the now-famous anthropomorphic, shades-wearing lemon.