The Blue Grinch Meme Is Everywhere. Here’s What the ‘That Feeling When Knee Surgery Is Tomorrow’ Actually Means

If you’ve suddenly started seeing images of a blue-faced Grinch and mentions of knee surgery online, don’t worry, you are still sane. Knee surgeries haven’t become the new lip fillers. It’s just the meme of the moment.

"That Feeling When Knee Surgery Is Tomorrow." I’ll admit that when I saw the images of a blue-faced Grinch pop up on social media, I thought it was a big inside joke I wasn’t getting because I wasn’t hip like the youths. I even considered that it may be profound social commentary, like the Chill Guy meme.

Turns out, I was overthinking it. As tech journalist Taylor Lorenz explains in her User Mag newsletter, the meme is mostly used as a meta joke.

“Posting the blue Grinch knee surgery meme is a low pressure way to build community online, make connections with other young people who like absurdist humor, and potentially go viral if your meme account pops off,” Lorenz said. “Sometimes people use the meme to allude to a dreaded event, but it's mostly used ironically.”

Meme history. Furthermore, while the meme is ubiquitous, it’s not new. “That Feeling When Knee Surgery Is Tomorrow” first popped up in mid-2021, according to Know Your Meme, although the image that accompanied it wasn’t originally the Grinch. In fact, the meme came into the world by way of a triumphant-looking squirrel.

It later spawned various iterations, including one with Drake and the one burning up the Internet right now. As reported by Lorenz, the recent resurgence of the meme began on TikTok, where users started posting it ironically. Hundreds of meme pages joined in on the phone, using the blue Grinch meme as their profile picture. Since then, it’s become common on Instagram and X.

Enter the grifters. Of course, since we can’t have nice things without someone trying to make a buck off them, the grifters have already started to appear. I’m talking about those folks who make crypto coin out of the most random things, including the world’s most perfect pigmy hippo, Moo Deng.

That’s right, “That Feeling When Knee Surgery Is Tomorrow” has its own coin, known as $KNEE, on the Solana blockchain. While that may sound hilarious, it’s important to note that memecoins are volatile assets, many of which are scams, that are very unlikely to deliver returns.

Staying power. As with all memes, the blue-faced Grinch is unlikely to stay around for long. Remember when everything was brat? Well, we’re over that already. How about Dune’s phallic-looking sandworm? Again, old. But that’s OK. Memes aren’t meant to stick around forever. One thing we can be sure of: A new one will pop up soon.

Image | Xataka On

Related | Introverts of the World, We’re Taking Back the Internet