The ability of a meme to grow and transform, seemingly on its own, is quite amazing. Yet memes don’t actually transform on their own — they are in fact transformed by people. Take Leeroy Jenkins for example.

Either you know who Leeroy Jenkins is or you don’t (don’t feel bad if you don’t, I had no idea what this referred to until very, very recently, thus I have apparently been living under a rock for the past few years). But I’ll get to that in a minute.

In case you don’t know who Leeroy Jenkins is, you can watch the video below (it does contain a bit of foul language — you were warned):

So here’s the basic story behind this, as described by Wikipedia: “Leeroy Jenkins, sometimes mis-spelled Leroy Jenkins and often elongated with numerous additional letters, is an Internet phenomenon named for a character created by player Ben Schultz in Blizzard Entertainment’s popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The character has become popular thanks to a machinima video of the game that circulated around the Internet. The phenomenon has since spread beyond the boundaries of the gaming community into other online and mainstream media.” To make a long story short, some people thought creating a moronic character named Leeroy Jenkins, and have him get all his buddies killed in World of Warcraft would be funny.

In case you have doubts about how popular this meme actually became, here’s a reference to it on the popular trivia gameshow Jeopardy!:

So why do these types of memes catch on? What makes them popular? I would argue that there is one overwhelmingly powerful force that drives memes such as Leeroy Jenkins to grow: tribalization.

Finding something funny is a really weird thing (especially when it’s kind of an inside joke like Leeroy Jenkins) — it puts you in a group that is ‘in the know’ about a particular phenomenon. But it’s not enough to just know about it, you also need to have enough backstory to understand why it’s funny.

In this case, if you’ve never seen or heard of World of Warcraft before, then the Leeroy Jenkins video may just elicit a slight chuckle. Having a frame for the meme is what makes it so powerful however — if you know that World of Warcraft is notoriously addictive, and that players are renowned for their meticulous planning (and not in a good way), then the parodic nature of the video becomes apparent. Leeroy Jenkins, like other memes, shows us that the frame for the meme is just as important as the meme itself.