A chat with the creator of the 'relatable Jeremy Strong meme'
One of 2023's finest bits
Here’s a question: is a meme really a meme if it’s made by predominately one person?
The answer, of course, is yes — but that’s not really the point. Instead, it was a clumsy segue into sharing a meme that has taken over my life in recent weeks: relatable Jeremy Strong.
The idea is simple, a video of Jeremy Strong (AKA Kendall from Succession) being verbose is paired alongside text describing a mundane issue.
Here’s an example:
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And, for good measure, another:
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There are few memes related to Succession itself (like the above), but the majority use clips of interviews with the manically wordy Jeremy Strong:
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The memes are beautiful. They’re pocket-sized snapshots, hyper-specific expressions of life ported through the pretentiousness of Jeremy Strong’s garrulity.
I first came across them on TikTok, but after a while I noticed something surprising: every one I had seen was made by the same user.
Since then, I’ve seen a few more relatable Jeremy Strong memes from elsewhere, but the majority of them are made by a single individual.
I had to find out more. So, friends, that’s precisely what I did.
Sam Huberty, 33, hails from Minnesota, but lives in Austin, Texas. He works as a corporate trainer at an auto insurance company and, in his spare time, makes relatable Jeremy Strong memes.
“I really started making memes during the pandemic,” he tells me.
The goal, Huberty continues, was to have some fun and connect with his friends.
Over the past couple of years he’s messed around with different formats, but he really started getting serious attention with the relatable Jeremy Strong memes.
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“The inspiration for the memes came about in an organic way,” he says. “My girlfriend and I had binged Succession leading up to the series finale and I was suddenly inundated by all of these great edits of the Roy family, Tom, and Cousin Greg.”
This influx of Succession content meant he was “thinking about [the show] all the time” — so it didn’t take long for Huberty to try his hand at making memes related to it.
He was a huge fan of the meme style used by accounts like @pritzkermemes and @nocontextwade123, so he started to search YouTube for clips of Kendall Roy — Huberty’s favourite Succession character — to try and emulate them.
The idea from here, he tells me, was to apply “stuff from my childhood, dating experiences, the overall peaks and valleys of my 20s and early 30s into a similar format.”
And the outcome? Magic. Pure unadulterated magic.
For example, this is the first relatable Jeremy Strong meme he created:
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But why have the memes hit a nerve?
First off, as Huberty points out, there’s “the alchemy between Jeremy’s earnestly poetic way with words and the lowbrow, relatable experiences that I think myself and a lot of people have in their young adult lives.”
This is definitely true, but I think it goes even deeper.
In today’s climate, Jeremy Strong is an unusual actor (something highlighted in the infamous New Yorker article) — but this isn’t a bad thing.
Many screen actors have completely abandoned pretentiousness — and Jeremy Strong? Well, quite the opposite.
The majority of TV and movie stars have adopted what I’d call the Jennifer Lawrence school of relatability; ‘we’re just like you, we love pizza, and acting is just playing around!’
This, if genuine, is fine. People can be who they want to be. The thing is, it feels that the industry in general encourages actors to adopt this everyman persona to avoid being ridiculed for believing in the craft or virtuosity of acting.
And this is what makes Jeremy Strong so alluring: he clearly doesn’t give a solitary fuck.
As Huberty puts it, “people love his little idiosyncrasies, like how he will stutter over the word ‘and’ 11 times, but then just toss out words like ‘concomitant’ or a phrase like ‘a singularity of wanting’ without even thinking.”
What the relatable Jeremy Strong memes do is take this loquacity and twist its meaning, forcing him to say the sort of ‘we’re-just-regular-people’ things that other actors do.
It is, as the actor himself would put it, the act of a merry prankster.
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The memes Huberty makes aren’t mocking, they’re a celebration, a way of bringing two disparate worlds together — and it’s a beautiful thing to be putting out there.
As he says, “I really find it kind of novel and exciting that my little memes are having a little moment and people enjoy them.”
Long may Jeremy Strong continue talking like a Victorian street urchin.