There’s a rising practice of adding “Only in Ohio” to the captions of strange photos and videos from the Buckeye State. It appears that the “Ohio will be eliminated” bus sign is the seed from whence this meme grew in 2016 when it was circulated on social media.
Shortly after the joke spread, posting unusual photographs and videos with the captions “Only in Ohio” or “can’t even do something in Ohio” became all the rage. Across social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter, thousands of users have shared their own twists on the strange meme.
Why is Ohio Memes Getting So Much Attention on Social Media?
The unusual automobile video was posted in Ohio on the popular account Videos that Go Hard. Their widely shared post did nothing but boost the meme’s initial popularity.
A bus stop with the words “Ohio will be eliminated” written in bad English became viral in 2016 after being posted on Tumblr. From there, the image made its way to Twitter and Instagram, where it was further satirized as a threat in the state of Ohio.
In 2019, the pinnacle of these memes appeared online; it was a cartoon made in Microsoft Paint depicting two astronauts, one of which was aware of Ohio’s global dominance and the other of whom was dangerously oblivious.
“Wait, it’s all Ohio?” The always has been meme structure will continue to be popular into the 2020s. The negative connotation that the two astronauts’ format attached to Ohio has persisted after its obsolescence.
Ohio-related memes have been around since 2016, but they really started to take off in late 2022. Videos set to the tune of “Swag Like Ohio” first surfaced online in August 2022 and have since gone widespread. In addition to 2.6 billion views on TikTok, the tag “only in Ohio” has been used in innumerable tweets.
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