Hello! Welcome to another installment of Me, You, and Meme Reviews. This is the podcast segment/recurring blog in which we, the esteemed hosts of Review Party Dot Com, inspect an item which has received a heaping of meme reviews. In the past, we have covered the Three Wolf Moon shirt, the Bic for Her pen, the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer, and yes, those lovely “Haribo” Sugar Free Gummy Bears, to name just a few. Okay, How to Avoid Huge Ships and A Million Random Digits to name a few more.

This week, we’ve set our sights on these:

Now obviously, you already saw it at the top of the page, you knew what you were getting into. But you might not know how this works.

See, we at Review Party love a good review. We love a review that informs us and helps us spend our money wisely, and we love a review that makes us laugh. There’s value in each. But when it comes to these meme review products, it’s usually impossible to find the real in the mountains of fake (and sometimes funny).

That’s why we take a real look at each item, unpack the history of why it went viral, explore its impact, then give it a review ourselves.

So Where Did This Start?

This meme review is still green when compared to many we’ve featured.

It all starts with Cory’s review, smack in the early days of the pandemic, when everyone was on their phones and not looking to dress up whatsoever. If you were searching for yoga pants and came across Cory keeping it real, wouldn’t you share that?

Well, people did. It was on Instagram, Facebook, and all over the “news.”

This is typically how meme reviews proliferate. Whether its Buzzfeed or Huffpost or a segment on Ellen (back when we liked her), a meme review would get seen and more would follow.

BUT. That hasn’t exactly happened here.

In the past, there has been a pile-on effect, as more and more people seek to get in on the joke - be it a goofy wolf shirt, a useless banana slicer, or a book about evading ships - but that hasn’t happened here.

Well, except for Kelly:

Beyond Kelly taking her own wonderful picture, most reviews simply mention that they’d seen Cory’s, they thought it was funny, and now they’re happy, sad, or indifferent about the purchase.

No bigger jokes, no long stories, just reference and reverence to Cory. The best we’ve got in the jokesters category (again, beyond Kelly), is the product questions section:

So what gives? Is it that the product isn’t funny enough to joke about? Not odd, like buying milk online was in the early 2000s? Not seemingly pointless, like a book of random numbers?

Or, is it that we’re too early? We’ve only seen the seed planted, and it will take time for the mighty oak to grow?

It’s not as if society has changed. The review still went viral. People are still reviewing the three wolf moon shirt, the gummy bears, the banana slicer, all of them. So maybe we just need to wait.

Well. Sorry, but WE won’t

Because the way Me, You, and Meme Reviews works doesn’t give us that time. We’ve spent this week recapping the mythos of the product and its cultural impact. Now, next week, we’ll drop our own REAL and FAKE reviews of these yoga pants.

Be sure to come back for PART TWO.

If you prefer to listen to any of this instead of read (it’s a little late for that now), you can hear this in RPDC episode 120.