Carl / Coral

Rick Grimes just wanted his son's attention. What he got was a meme.

The Walking Dead gave us many things: zombie drama, declining ratings, and Andrew Lincoln's increasingly strained pronunciation of his son's name. "CARL!" became "CORAL!" became the setup for every bad dad joke the internet could conjure. The format peaked around 2014-2015, when the show was still culturally relevant and people still cared enough to mock it.

The structure was simple: Rick calls Carl's name, delivers a terrible pun, Carl looks dead inside. "Hey Coral, what do you call a zombie who writes music? A decomposer, Coral." The worse the joke, the better the meme. Rick's desperate need to connect with his traumatized son through wordplay was somehow both heartbreaking and hilarious.

But The Walking Dead's cultural footprint shrank with each passing season. By the time the show finally ended, the Carl memes had long since shambled off into irrelevance. The format requires knowing the characters, and fewer people do each year.

Carl died in the show. The meme followed. Rick's still out there somewhere, probably telling puns to no one.