Anyone who uses the internet regularly will have encountered a “meme.” According to Google, a meme is a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc. that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users. A “dank meme,” however, is defined by Urban Dictionary as a meme that is just really radical, cool, and neat. However, there are memes that fly under most people’s radar, one of these being the Paul Blart memes.

“Paul Blart Mall Cop” was a movie that came out in 2009, with a sequel coming out on 2015. The memes consist of editing the movie poster to distort Blart’s face and change the letters around to form a humorous sentence. Usually, Blart’s face is distorted to make his mouth bigger or wider and his facial structure is moved around. Sometimes a different object is added to the picture, or his facial features are scaled to different sizes, often so big they come off of his face.

“There’s a bunch of different types of dank memes. There’s offensive dank memes, mainstream dank memes, and underground, like just starting up memes. Paul Blart memes aren’t any of those. They aren’t dank enough,” said freshman Dylan Florence. This raises an interesting point. Paul Blart memes aren’t well known, they are secret treasures of the internet that few know about. Where did the meme come from?