memes

Because the original meme resonates with a common situation that stems from a primal reaction.

It's a mammal thing.

Men look at butts and breasts whether or not they want to. Even gay guys look at women's breasts.

Women look at infants whether or not they want to. Even women who hate children can't help but involuntarily look at babies.

Similarly, men, women and children all react when a cat says "meow". That's because the cat learned to mimic a baby's cry to get attention from humans. Cats don't say meow to each other, only to humans, and it knows that we'll react.

So the thing about the meme is that it's comedically portraying a deep mammal instinct.

This is funny, because we like to think of ourselves as rationel people doing rationel actions based on rationel thoughts, instead of giving in to primal urges, like in this meme, where the guy just does an irrationel action based on an irrationel but primal urge.

Chaplin was the OG comedian, so of course he covered this. Chaplin was not just slapstick. The dude was basically the first one to take comedy seriously. His movies covered everything from silly slapstick to world politics, but more importantly he used every emotion that humans have to do it. It's not just laughing. He played with fear, love, surprise, melancholy, relief, betrayal, unfairness, jealousy, etc. etc.

Watching his movies today is unforgiving to the media. It absolutely sucks and I'm hardly amused because of the poor quality and timing, but I can imagine the people in the early 1900s being blown away, not just by moving pictures, but also the emotions that he managed to bring through the screen without even playing any sound to support the displayed emotion. The lack of sound is crucial here, because it explains the "overplayed" facial expressions. Today we can look at a blank face and feel the way the music director wants us to feel..

Anyway...

Since that, I'd say that Rowan Atkinson is probably the only comedian to scientifically investigate comedy in all it's broadness. Of course the contemporary standup comedians are processing it in the same way as marketing companies do SEO, but in the full spectrum of what is comedy, the latest important comedians are Charles Chaplin and Rowan Atkinson, with an honorable mention to Monty Python for injection of absurdism.

Actually I'm surprised there aren't more images like this floating around. It's just a thing that happens. I see this sort of thing in mediocre comedies all the time. Just one image comes to dominate because of it's meme value (it's known to be known).