Meme History: Success Kid
If you’re familiar with this child, brace yourself, because I’m about to make you feel really old.
On September 23rd, 2024, Sam Griner celebrated his 18th birthday.
In honor of and in thanks to the Griner family, today we’re diving into a quintessential icon of late 2000s, early 2010s memedom – Success Kid.
Origins
On August 26, 2007, Laney Griner took this photo of her 11-month-old son Sam, fist clenched, at the beach.
It wasn’t the only photo taken that day, but it was ultimately the most famous. Little Sammy’s likeness first circulated to the broader internet on MySpace, where the initial caption actually attributed anger to the baby – often via the line “I hate sandcastles.”
But over the next few years, he joined the pantheon of so-called advice animal memes as a mascot for much more positive messages – circulating mainly on Reddit, but also quickmeme, tumblr, and really all over the place online.
Spread
Just as popular as other internet icons of the day like Condescending Wonka, Thanks Obama, This is Fine, or Bad Luck Brian, in 2012, he appeared on billboards all over the UK. In 2013, the Obama White House used him to promote their immigration reform initiative.
And in 2015, he was briefly in a Superbowl Commercial.
That year, CNN dubbed him “the internet’s most famous baby.” But they were writing about him for a very serious reason – Sam’s dad had developed chronic kidney disease.
GoFundMe Campaign
Leveraging his fame, Sam’s mother started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the pre-treatment and transplant he needed. It was actually wildly successful. Within a week, they’d surpassed their stated goal of $75,000, and by the time they closed the fundraiser, it’d raised over $100k.
In thanks, Sam’s mom posted a meme about it on Instagram, followed by a father-son reenactment which was captioned #successkidney.
In a 2020 interview with BuzzFeed, then-14-year-old Sam said that it was weird being famous for something you don’t remember doing as a baby, but he’s glad it's been such a positive thing generally, and specifically that it saved his dad’s life.
We’re glad too. And if the track record of Success Kid is anything to go by, we’ve got many more years of fun ahead of us.
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