"You will sell fish": the story of the sweetest meme of this summer

A photo of eight cats sitting in front of a fish seller is considered viral by many netizens. They claim that the picture with the caption "Will you sell fish? No, I'm just showing you. Beautiful", after the first acquaintance is firmly established in the head. How did this meme, which is already being talked about abroad, appear and why is it ideal and self-sufficient?

It's not so easy to find the place where the meme originated,but we did it. For the first time, a picture with cats "You sell fish" appeared on Vkontakte, in the public Memes about cats (by laughing) on July 14, 2021. It was published by the administrators of the community, who could not even think that such a resounding success was waiting for the joke.

Laughter is caused both by the situation itself with tailed envious people, and by a fictional dialogue with specially made children's mistakes. It was this combination of images and text that turned out to be "to the point" and gave rise to a meme that is now spinning in thousands of heads. Now the original publication in the public has more than 12 thousand likes, 3.3 thousand reposts and more than half a million views.

From VKontakte, the joke went to Twitter, then to Facebook. Of course, it could not but give rise to many imitations, none of which came close to the popularity of the original. At first, they changed the photo from the public, changing the dialog, but then completely exclusive options appeared on the network. For example, about a cat and a blackberry.

And the version from the public "Suffering Middle Ages" is completely designed in the style of the community and may even seem to some not quite decent.

And now it's not cats, but a squirrel.

Some cats were not enough and some people continued to fantasize on this topic, but with people in the main roles.

Evgeny Rybov, the official voice of MTV Russia, also fell under the distribution.

There are also jokes that only indirectly relate to the viral meme, but their "origins" are visible to the naked eye. Why none of the memes even came close to the original version in popularity is difficult to say. Probably, the success of some memes and the failure of others is already a question that scientists should answer. In general, we still need to find out why memes with cats are almost always doomed to success.