It’s Melania Trump‘s birthday, and the White House decided to celebrate by posting a photo of her on social media. “Happy Birthday, @FLOTUS,” the White House wrote on its official Instagram and Twitter pages.
But of course the Internet couldn’t let well enough alone. People on Twitter immediately started turning the photo WH chose into memes. After all, the pic was an interesting choice. It’s of Trump sitting on the far end of a couch, alone, as dozens of paparazzi take her picture. There wasn’t a cute headshot the White House could have posted? A candid? Just this couch photo?
Check it for yourself below. I’m not surprised the memes are rolling in.
Here are just a few (very funny) examples.
This isn’t the first time Melania Trump has been at the center of a White House meme. Remember over the holidays, when people were freaking out over the red Christmas trees the Trumps picked as decorations? Those memes still slay me, TBH.
According to People, Donald Trump said last year he didn’t get a big birthday present for Melania because he was too busy.
“Well, I better not get into that because I may get in trouble,” the President said on Fox & Friends, per People. “Maybe I didn’t get her so much. I tell you what, she has done—I got her a beautiful card. You know, I’m very busy to be running out looking for presents, OK! But I got her a beautiful card and some beautiful flowers.” He did, however, give Melania a shout-out in an email campaign. “Melania is my rock and foundation, and I wouldn’t be the man I am today without her by my side,” he wrote at the time last year.
This is Melania Trump’s third birthday in the White House as FLOTUS.
As we all know, Chrissy Teigen is a national treasure who should be protected at all costs. I adore her for many reasons—like her epic social media trolling moments and her real talks about everything from parenting to body image. But one of my favorite things about Teigen is her ability to unwittingly go viral every time she attends a public event. Remember when she got hit in the face with an umbrella on a New Year’s Eve telecast? Or how about when she seemingly dozed off at the 2017 Oscars? I’m eternally grateful for these moments.
And now we have a new one to add to the list. It all went down last night at a Miami Heat basketball game in Florida: Teigen showed up courtside with husband John Legend and actress Gabrielle Union to watch Union’s husband, Dwyane Wade, play in his final regular season home game before retiring. At one point during the game, Wade ended up in the laps of Teigen and Legend, and the photo (by Charles Trainer Jr. for the Miami Herald) is simply perfection. Just look at those facial expressions!
Naturally, Teigen had a witty response to the photo, calling it a “Renaissance painting.” She also said it was “an honor” to be crashed into by Wade.
Everyone had a good laugh about the whole thing. One fan tweeted, “This kind of shit seems to always happen to you lol. First the New Year’s umbrella and now this.”
Naturally, people are turning this viral moment into a slew of hilarious memes:
This wasn’t the only fun moment at the game, which kicked off with a celebration of Wade’s career. Union got in on the action by playfully grabbing her husband’s butt at one point:
Mark Brown/Getty Images
And then there was a sweet moment with the night’s other big star, Union and Wade’s baby daughter, Kaavia James Union Wade:
Michael Reaves/Getty Images
Perhaps all retiring players should invite Chrissy Teigen to their final game. They’ll be pretty much guaranteed an amazing viral moment.
At this year’s Golden Globes, the biggest story wasn’t who was snubbed or which celebrities were dressed the best. (Although we do have thoughts on that.) No, the night was all about Kelleth Cuthbert, the 30-something woman caught photobombing several celebrities on the red carpet while holding a tray of Fiji Water. If you’ve looked at any red carpet photos from the 2019 Golden Globes, you’ve definitely seen her:
PHOTO: Stefanie Keenan
Dubbed “Fiji Water Girl,” the memes quickly came flooding in about the mysterious woman with the excellent photobombing skills. “If Bradley Cooper doesn’t bring the Fiji girl out on stage to perform ‘Shallow’ with him I’m turning this show off,” one new fan wrote on Twitter. “FYI: I have already written 200 pages of the Fiji Water girl’s inner monologue tonight,” said another. A star truly was born.
The memes were fun, but we had questions. Mainly, how did this all come together? And what’s Cuthbert’s story? What does it feel like to reach sudden Internet fame just for standing there?
We were able to track down Cuthbert after the red carpet, once she was off the clock and had changed out of her signature blue dress (to match Fiji Water’s bottle cap color, of course) and into jeans. Turns out, she’s a model and actress in her early thirties, married, and from Toronto but currently living in Los Angeles. Cuthbert used to be a social worker in Canada, specializing in mental health and addictions counseling, while modeling on the side. She was going to apply for grad school, but the modeling work was going so well she decided to take a year off and fully commit to it. She never went back.
In the years since, she’s done commercials, PSAs, short films, and worked modeling gigs at other award shows, but this is by far the biggest exposure. Cuthbert tells Glamour she’s confused and overwhelmed by all the attention, though she thinks it’s hilarious. “I do love a good meme, so I think it’s incredibly ironic and funny that I’m one now,” she says. “The first meme of 2019, apparently! My husband is laughing very hard about all of this.”
“This is something I would go viral for,” she jokes. “I feel like I’ve been photobombing people since I was a kid.”
Cuthbert says it took a while for her to realize something was happening. “A couple people came up to me and were like, ‘FIJI’s going viral,’” she says, but she assumed it was about all of the women there for Fiji. “I thought maybe I’m in the background of a couple shots.”
But more and more strangers started coming up to her to tell her she had become A Thing. Others asked for selfies (no celebrities though, womp). Hours later, when she finally went on break, she looked at her phone and saw hundreds of texts and DMs from people. Her Instagram following the morning of the Globes was 53,000; now, it’s at 76,300 at press time. “One of my print agents tagged me in a meme of myself,” she says, with a laugh. “I called my mom on my break, and she was already laughing when she picked up the phone. My parents are not very hip to things going on, so the fact that they had already received this information says a lot about how viral it already went.”
When Cuthbert woke up that morning, she certainly didn’t expect Internet stardom. This was just a side gig in between modeling and acting. She did her own hair and makeup before the event, though, “I wish now that I hadn’t chosen to sleep in a little longer. I thought, ‘I don’t need to put that much effort into myself…no one’s really going to see me.'” Yeahhh, that didn’t happen.
Cuthbert says that the report her moves were calculated isn’t true. “I never said that. I just stand where I’m told, wherever there is an opening.” Cuthbert tells us she simply moved from spot to spot and passed out water as she tried to keep a neutral-but-pleasant face. “Everyone has their work or event persona,” she explains. “You try to look at least somewhat pleasant and not have too much resting bitch face. You have to look somewhat friendly and happy to be engaging with people.” She wasn’t trying to photobomb everyone, she says: “Sometimes you’re caught between a lot of cameras, so there’s a lot of photographers at different angles. You’re just kind of trapped sometimes. See that’s the thing: I feel like I was looking away, but sometimes I was looking so I could move out of the way.”
PHOTO: Stefanie Keenan
So what’s next for Cuthbert now that she’s a star? First up, processing it all. “I haven’t even had the time to sit down and think about what could come from this, but truly anything would be exciting. I would love to get an acting role. That would be amazing.” Before all of this happened, her goals were to get a theatrical agent to shift away from modeling. More doors might be open now, but Cuthbert is taking it in stride. “I definitely think I’m ready for [the fame], but such is the nature of the Internet that these things just go by in a flash,” she says. “No one will find this funny in a week. We’ll see! I think all of this stuff is very fleeting. I enjoy the craft of acting, but all the other stuff around it is just noise. It’s light and fun, and I think it’s meant to be taken that way. Not too seriously.”
That said, “I saw a good [meme] of me that said, ‘Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.'”
Not all heroes wear capes: some of them carry trays of Fiji Water. Such is the case for a mysterious brunette woman at the 2019 Golden Globes, who it seems was hired by Fiji Water for the event but ended up photobombing several celebrities’ photos instead, including Julianne Moore, Alyssa Milano, and Jeff Bridges.
The Internet quickly took to this woman and dubbed her “Fiji Water Girl.” Everything about her is iconic—from the way she’s holding that tray of water to her stare, which is clearly saying, “My blood type is Fiji Water and yours should be, too.”
Take a look at just a few photos of Fiji Water Girl in action, below:
Let’s start with this photo of Jeff Bridges. In the background is Fiji Water Girl, who, in my mind, is thinking, “I think those celebs over there are dehydrated! Don’t worry, I’m on my way!”
PHOTO: Getty Images
Fiji Water Girl is behind Julianne Moore in this pic, but she isn’t starstruck. She has a mission to quench as many thirsts as possible, and nothing will get in her way. Not even the woman who played Alma Coin in The Hunger Games!
PHOTO: Getty Images
Alyssa Milano might be in the forefront, but Fiji Water Girl has her eyes peeled on the person who just ate a bag of pretzels and is in desperate need of a refreshment. She is a light in this dark, dark world.
PHOTO: Getty Images
“FYI: I have already written 200 pages of the Fiji Water Girl’s inner monologue tonight,” one person wrote on Twitter about 2019’s reigning queen. Check out some more reactions, below:
Umbrellas can be a tricky accessory: You always need to have your eyes on them, so as to not accidentally leave it behind at any restaurant/coffee shop/store you pop into; and you need to be hyper-vigilant about how much space it takes up when they’re open, so as to not pose a threat to innocent bystanders. No one learned this latter lesson more painfully than Leslie Jones and Chrissy Teigen during NBC’s New Year’s Eve live broadcast from Times Square. In front of rolling cameras, the two got to bond over an incident involving a badly behaved, very intrusive umbrella—which, of course, turned into 2019’s first great meme.
It all went down on Monday night in New York. As the ball dropped at midnight, Jones, Teigen, and Carson Daly—the hosts of NBC’s holiday program—shared happy hugs to mark the new year. Because of the rainy weather, they were equipped with clear umbrellas. Unfortunately, as Jones went in for an embrace, her umbrella bashed Teigen squarely in the face, prompting a classically hilarious Chrissy Reaction Shot™️.
The incident prompted plenty of hilarious tweets from all parties involved, as well as fans watching from home. Jones apologized to Teigen via a cute tweet—which Teigen responded to in kind.
“Ugh I can’t believe I hit @chrissyteigen in face!! Lordt!! I love you boo!! So sorry!! #thatswhyihateumbrellas,” Jones wrote.
It’s Joe Biden’s seventy-fifth birthday, and Barack Obama just celebrated it by creating his own version of those iconic Obama-Biden friendship memes.
The former president of the United States uploaded a picture of himself to Twitter giving a televised speech while the former VP grins and points at the audience in the background with this stellar caption:
“ME: Joe, about halfway through the speech, I’m gonna wish you a happy birth–
BIDEN: IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!
ME: Joe.”
Obama’s tweet continued: “Happy birthday to @JoeBiden, my brother and the best vice president anybody could have.”
By now you know the former POTUS and VPOTUS have been the stars of many, many online memes commemorating their endearing relationship, contrasting Obama’s cool presidential poise with Biden’s kooky vibes.
Biden himself is a fan, telling NBC News earlier this year that he’s still not over the Internet’s creativity, and even has favorites. “A couple of ones I liked were ones where I was trying on Ray Bans and he’s lying on the couch and I turn around and I said, ‘Which ones do you like?’ And he looks at me and says, ‘Joe, Joe, come on, focus here,'” he said in the interview. He’s also quite partial to the ones of him pranking Trump. #Same.
