#TeaLizard Will Restore Your Faith In Memes
But that’s none of my business.
On Tuesday morning, Good Morning America tweeted about Crying LeBron, a nascent meme born out of Sunday's NBA Finals celebration. It hasn't caught on quite yet — at least not as much as its forbearers. So GMA decided to poll its audience on how they felt about it in relation to other popular memes, except they referred to Kermit sipping tea as #tealizard and chose to give spotlight to a picture of Jim Carrey in the Mask and call it #smockin. These are both actually gems from a subset of Twitter known as Weird Twitter, specifically from a user named @trillballins. Of course, that's a very niche reference and people freaked out (and created a lot of memes, which you can see below).
A member of GMA's social production team — the person who actually wrote the tweet — tipped me off to trillballins's account and an official spokesperson for the show did as well. Complex heard back from trillballins, who told them, "After a while, a meme can lose its original identity and become something more generic. Crying Jordan becomes the Crying Man. Dat Boi becomes the bike frog. Kermit sipping tea becomes the tea lizard. Why tea lizard? Well he's not actually a frog anyway. He's a puppet."
Trillballins is right. The reason #tealizard is so great is because it does what great memes are supposed to do — evolve. It adds another wrinkle to one of the internet's most recognizable images. Tea lizard might be a troll and it might be from a large corporate entity, but it's really funny and I never want to have to explain this all to my parents.