1. In January, a scene from Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story in which Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson fight about their failing marriage became the go-to template for expressing disagreement online. What, in their loquacious, highly actorly row, did Driver’s character identify as his real betrayal of his wife?

   1. He slept with another woman

   2. 
He enjoyed a joke with another woman

   3. He valued his career above his wife’s


   4. He did not want to move to Los Angeles

2. A video of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders gave birth in February to a new meme in which people amended his statement, “I am once again asking for …” to make their own requests. What was Sanders asking in the original clip?

   1. Your financial support


   2. You to vote out Trump


   3. Billionaires to pay more tax


   4. Elizabeth Warren’s support

3. In March, rap-rock titans Rage Against the Machine tweeted an important exception to the anti-state sentiment of their song Killing in the Name, saying: “On this occasion, it’s best you do what they tell ya.” What was the government instruction?

   1. Maintain a minimum distance of two metres


   2. Follow the food pyramid


   3. Wear a seatbelt


   4. Wash your hands with soap

4. In April, images to show “nature is healing” in the absence of people went viral on social media as a heartwarming upside of lockdown. Unfortunately, nearly all of them were fake news. Which one wasn’t?

   1. Swans and dolphins returned to the Venetian canals


   2. Elephants broke into a village in Yunan province to gorge on corn


   3. Mountain goats ran riot through a Welsh town


   4. A family of boars roamed the quiet streets of Bergamo

5. In May, original prankster Elon Musk and self-described ego-death survivor Grimes claimed to have named their baby daughter X Æ A-12 – for the couple’s favourite unknown variable, the elven spelling of Ai (meaning “love and/or artificial intelligence”) and their favourite aircraft. How, for the Ai of god, is it pronounced?

   1. “X, A, I”


   2. “X-Ash-Archangel”


   3. “Ki-Ai-L”, like “Kyle”


   4. No one knows. Not even her parents

6. In a viral interview with GQ, the actor Robert Pattinson shared his ambitious concept for “a pasta which you can hold in your hand”. He dubbed it piccolini cuscino, or little pillow. How might one go about making it?

   1. Microwave cooked penne, cornflakes, cheese slices, sugar and sauce; spoon into a hollowed-out burger bun


   2. Fill a muffin tray with spaghetti, tinned chopped tomatoes and cheese; bake for 20 minutes


   3. Stuff a giant gnocchi with cheese


   4. Make a loaded pasta bake and serve in slices


7. In July, a video of hyper-realistic cakes – made to resemble a banana, a coconut, a loo roll and a shoe – went viral with the caption: “These are all cakes.” For weeks afterwards, nothing you saw on the internet could be trusted to definitely not be cake. But who was especially enraged by the “Is it a cake?” meme?

   1. Anti-obesity campaigners who calculated the cakes’ average calories


   2. An artisan cronut-maker who said they had lost business as a result


   3. An online community of people who really hate fondant


   4. The writer of a viral opinion piece who blamed the meme for his trust issues

8. In August, the actor Reese Witherspoon made a meme representing each month of this harrowing year with one of her roles. If January was perky, polished Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, which character summed up Witherspoon’s state of mind from June to September?

   1. 
Elena Richardson in Little Fires Everywhere, out for revenge


   2. Madeline Mackenzie mid-breakdown in Big Little Lies


   3. Grimy-faced Cheryl Strayed, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild


   4. Elizabeth in Just Like Heaven, who is literally a ghost

9. In September, a video of a man blissfully longboarding along a highway, set to Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, went viral on TikTok. What beverage was he chugging as he went?

   1. La Croix


   2. Cranberry juice


   3. Fiji Water


   4. Budweiser

10. In October, a UK government advertisement suggesting people working in the creative industries might like to retrain was scrapped after being roundly derided online. According to the tagline, whose next job could be “in cyber” (they just don’t know it yet)?

    1. Fatima the ballerina


    2. Padma the poet


    3. Nadia the painter


    4. Varsha the actor

Solutions

1:B - The actual line is: “You shouldn’t be upset that I fucked her! You should be upset that I had a laugh with her!” Hunter Harris, writing in Vulture, called it “the funniest freaking thing I’ve ever heard in my entire freaking life”. The scene where Driver punches the wall was widely repurposed on social media., 2:A - In the original video, posted just before the new year, Sanders asked for donations to his presidential campaign. His run ended in April. , 3:D - Official advice to wash your hands for as long as it takes you to sing “Happy birthday” twice to stop the spread of coronavirus was applied to other songs in a popular meme (in the case of Killing in the Name, five “Now you do what they told ya”s). , 4:C - While the Great Orme goats did invade Llandudno, the other images predated lockdown or were otherwise misattributed. The widespread sharing of these images sparked the “nature is healing, we are the virus” meme., 5:D - On Instagram, Grimes (real name Claire Boucher) told fans it was pronounced like a). On the Joe Rogan podcast, Musk said b). “Kyle Musk” was suggested by Reddit. And after all that, it’s probably not even the baby’s legal name, because Californian law does not permit numbers or symbols. Are you tired? I’m tired., 6:A - This may be an oversimplification of Pattinson’s process. Demonstrating over FaceTime for GQ, Pattinson not only set one of his latex gloves on fire while attempting to brand his creation with the initials “PC”, but also broke his microwave., 7:C - The Fondant Hate forum on Reddit, bringing together 160,000 people “fighting against the fad of beautiful cakes that taste AWFUL”, was triggered by the meme for glorifying what it calls “the devil’s sugary Play-Doh”., 8:C - Witherspoon encapsulated the summer of 2020 with a shot of herself as Strayed, tired, bedraggled and squinting into the middle distance into an uncertain future, and prompted her famous friends to follow suit with “the 2020 Challenge”. , 9:B - Nathan Apodaca, also known as @420Doggface208, shot the video after his car broke down on his way to work at a potato factory in Idaho. When it amassed more than 60m views, the cranberry juice brand Ocean Spray sent him a new truck., 10:A - Fatima the ballerina was the face of the programme to encourage young people to train in cybersecurity – criticised as crass, given job losses in the arts during the pandemic. Working “in cyber”, meanwhile, became a meme.

Scores

1. 10 and above.

   100%! Let these memes be the only memories you take from 2020.

2. 7 and above.

   All that time online this year has paid off for you.

3. 0 and above.

   What did you DO all year? It’s like you weren’t even on the internet at all!

4. 4 and above.

   Say what you will about 2020, but some of the memes were OK, weren’t they.