In January the biggest meme was Salt Bae and his weird salt-sprinkling tactics. In February a trio of new memes included Roll Safe, #HurtBae and the Drew Scanlon Reaction. But March 2017 seems to have brought along the best meme of 2017 so far. It’s actually not a new image – the two-year-old picture of Meryl Streep is from the SAG Awards 2015, where the actor was innocently shouting her support of Debbie Reynolds. Suddenly the image has entered circulation online once again, and for the past few days the internet has been awash with the Shouting Meryl meme, mostly used to quote classic call-and-response song lyrics.

It all started with this lovely interpretation of Missy Elliott’s 2002 banger ‘Work It’.

In a fairly standard example of how the meme developed, here’s The Killers’ ‘Mr Brightside’ getting the standard Meryl treatment:

Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend’ yields similar results:

As does Britney’s ‘…Baby One More Time’:

And, of course, Drake:

But things got slightly more interesting with ‘Empire State of Mind’, which took inspiration from Wrong Lyrics Christina:

The winning entry – so far, at least – has to be this beautiful re-interpretation of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’:

That one’s so good you almost don’t notice the misspelling of Galileo.

The post The singing Meryl meme is the first great viral joke of 2017 appeared first on NME.

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