El Grito: The Memes For Mexican Independence Day
On the night of 15 September, the president of Mexico stands on a balcony at the National Palace, rings a bell, and shouts the names of people who died in 1810. Hundreds of thousands of people in the Zócalo shout back. It is genuinely one of the great national rituals.
It is also, for about fourteen hours a year, the single funniest timeline on the internet.
The bit of history that makes all of this work
You need one fact, and the memes do the rest.
In 1810, Miguel Hidalgo was a parish priest in the town of Dolores. Early one morning he rang the church bell, which was the normal signal that mass was about to start, and the town turned up. He then used the assembled crowd to launch a war of independence against the Spanish crown.
So the founding moment of the Mexican nation is, structurally, a man getting a room full of people together under false pretences.
The internet has never let this go.
"Let us go to Father Hidalgo's mass" is a complete joke with no punchline attached, because everybody already knows what happens next. The funniest version is the one that never gets to the war at all, the reply from somebody at the back going "sorry, I only came to ask what time mass starts".
Two hundred and sixteen years later, and the national joke is still that nobody was told.
Hidalgo has notes on your football allegiance
This is the best one, and it requires you to hold two things in your head at once.
Hidalgo, remembering how you lot were cheering for Spain in the World Cup.
That is the entire joke and it is devastating. A man raised an army against the Spanish crown, was excommunicated, caught and executed, and his descendants put on a Spain shirt because the football was better. The Robert Downey Jr side-eye is doing an enormous amount of work here, and the edit is good enough that it takes a second to notice the face is not his.
Every country has a version of this joke. Very few have one where the aggrieved party is a specific dead priest.
The food is the actual holiday
Let us be honest about what most people are observing on the fifteenth.
"A pozole ya huele" means it already smells of pozole, and the word order is scrambled in exactly the way Yoda scrambles his, which is why Yoda is wearing the hat. That is a properly constructed joke. A bilingual grammar gag with a costume.
Now look at the logos along the bottom. This was made by the United States Meat Export Federation. A foreign pork marketing board built a Star Wars pun for Mexican Independence Day, and it lands. Somebody at an American trade association is very good at their job and nobody will ever know their name.
The other pozole meme is more straightforward and possibly more relatable.
Note that the bowls are real photographs, pasted into a cartoon. Nobody could find a drawn pozole good enough, so they used the real thing. That is the correct decision.
The cats, obviously
There is no holiday on earth that the internet will not immediately assign to cats.
Three cats in traje, correctly dressed, fireworks behind them. There is no joke. It is not trying to be a joke. It is 267 likes of pure sincerity and it is arguably the most patriotic thing in this entire article.
Though the second cat is usually where the honesty creeps in.
Every group has both of these cats. Frequently in the same person.
Two weeks of flags, one of them on a car
The other thing that happens in September is that the flag goes on everything, and somebody always has an opinion about it.
"They are putting the flag of Mexico on their cars. Better to put the indicator on when they turn." This is a very specific strain of national humour: the complaint that arrives dressed as a celebration. Nobody is actually against the flags. Everybody is genuinely against the turning.
And then there is the flag as a physical object with weight.
The whole ceremony is solemn, televised, and rehearsed, and somewhere in it a man is standing very still with a flagpole on his foot. "Eso lo explica todo" translates as "that explains everything", and it does.
The football, which is its own religion
September also drags everybody back to the national team, and the national team has trained the country into a very particular emotional reflex.
"La selección mexicana respira. Yo en corto: ¿y si siiiií?" The team does literally anything, exhales, exists, and some portion of the country immediately begins constructing a path to the final. This is the same population that will tell you, with total sincerity, that they have learned their lesson.
They have not learned their lesson. That is the point of the meme, and honestly it is the point of supporting anybody.
A quiz for people who were definitely at the Grito
Everyone posts the flag. Everyone shouts along. Far fewer could tell you which names they were shouting, and that gap is a quiz.
A NoodleStrike quiz looks like a normal yes or no quiz, except one button per question will not let itself be pressed. It slides away from the cursor, ignores the first couple of taps, or trades places with the other button at the exact moment they commit. You choose the verdict in advance. Your friend just performs the ritual of arriving at it.
Title it "¿Le entraste al Grito o nomás al pozole?" and run these five. The bracket is the button that still works.
- "Did you shout ¡Viva México! last night?" (Yes) Everybody says yes to this one honestly, which is exactly why it goes first.
- "Could you name three of the heroes you were shouting for?" (Yes) They could not. They will click yes anyway, and that is the joke.
- "Be honest, were you mainly there for the pozole?" (Yes) The one aimed straight at them. This is the screenshot.
- "Have you ever supported Spain in a football match?" (Yes) Hidalgo is watching. The button will make them confess.
- "Do you actually know what time the mass starts?" (No) Break the run here. The honest answer and the rigged answer finally agree, and the whole quiz lands on the oldest joke in the country.
Narrate it with Leonardo, who has eighteen moods and a costume for most of them. Run it as party-vibe, cool-thinking, laughing-jump, sunglasses-swagger and finally shrug, and he goes from hosting the party to having no idea what time anything starts, which is the correct arc for this material.
If you would rather the narrator be quietly unimpressed with your friend's patriotism, Mary has five composed moods and the best raised eyebrow available.
For the result card: "Confirmed patriot. Mostly of the pozole."
Every quiz example plays straight from the page, and how it works breaks down each trick.
Build one and settle who in the group chat was only there for the food.