• The Grinch talking about knee surgery is a popular meme among brainrotted teens.

• There's even — sigh — a crypto coin dedicated to knee-surgery memes.

• What does any of this mean? Probably nothing!

Over Thanksgiving, a family friend who happens to be in middle school showed me some memes from her debate-club group chat, including something she found particularly funny: an image of the Grinch, but blue, saying, "That feeling when knee surgery is tomorrow."

I didn't exactly "get it," apart from the vague awareness that sometimes memes are funny only because they're "random" — and this type of humor hits particularly hard before you get your driver's license.

I was curious, so I searched Instagram and found dozens and dozens of accounts dedicated to the meme (or at least that had set their profile photos and names to the image). Some of them were generic meme pages; others seemed to be real people.

I wasn't sure what to make of this.

“Knee surgery” is the hottest meme right now. Specifically the Grinch saying he has knee surgery tomorrow. There are dozens of blinch (blue grinch) knee surgery meme accounts on Instagram. This is what your children are doing

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Thankfully, the internet-culture reporter Taylor Lorenz did a deep dive in her newsletter, User Mag.

Though the meme started a few years ago, it picked up steam recently. She explains:

The Grinch knee surgery meme is kind of a meta joke. It's the spiritual successor to the Instagram meme culture of 2018 that birthed The World Record Egg and same post every day accounts. Posting the blue Grinch knee surgery meme is a low pressure way to build community online, make connections with other young people who like absurdist humor, and potentially go viral if your meme account pops off. Sometimes people use the meme to allude to a dreaded event, but it's mostly used ironically.

What Lorenz also found that was startling to me is that there is now a crypto coin about the meme: knee coin.

(An important disclaimer: I don't endorse any meme-based crypto coins, and, in fact, I'd strongly urge you to call a friend or your mom or anyone who cares about you if you are considering buying into crypto coins based on memes for middle schoolers.)