Meme · meme characters

By Deimos EMK · Published Sep 26, 2026 · Updated Sep 26, 2026 · 5 min read · AI-drafted, source-checked

Via GIPHY

• StatusMainstream
• Typenoun
• Categorymeme characters
• LaneMemes

See it in action

Video: Respect, power, banana #minions #banana , embedded from its original platform.

What the meme is

Minions memes are any meme format that uses the small yellow goggle-wearing characters from the Despicable Me and Minions movies. The characters themselves are immensely popular, the previous four Despicable Me and Minions movies earned a combined $3.7 billion worldwide, and both Minions and Despicable Me 3 grossed over $1 billion each, so the internet has a huge shared reference point to work with.

What makes Minions such durable meme material is that they sit at the exact intersection of sincere kids' entertainment and total absurdity. They're goofy, simple, and instantly recognizable, which means you can drop a Minion into almost any context, sacred, serious, or unhinged, and the contrast alone is the joke.

As one outlet put it, Minion memes have been a beloved part of internet culture for years, popping up in funny, absurd, and sometimes downright strange contexts.

In practice, the meme shows up in a few distinct modes. The first is the ironic-fandom mode, best captured by the #GentleMinions trend: teens and young adults showed up to screenings of Minions: The Rise of Gru in full suits and ties to emulate the character Gru, treating a kids' animated movie with mock-formal reverence.

The joke is the commitment, dressing like you're attending a gala to watch yellow blobs babble. The second mode is the absurd-remix mode, where Minions get edited into contexts they absolutely do not belong in. The Crucified Minion is the peak example: videos featuring a Minion nailed to a cross, complete with a crown of thorns and nails through its three-fingered hands, paired with serious talk about Jesus Christ's crucifixion.

The idea of a Minion dying for our sins is deliberately ridiculous, and that collision of the sacred and the silly is the entire engine of the joke.

The third mode is sincere usage that loops back around to being funny, people who genuinely engage with Minion content because they grew up with it. The Despicable Me franchise started in 2010, so many of the teens and twenty-somethings driving these trends literally grew up on the movies.

That means the line between ironic and sincere is blurry on purpose: someone in a suit at a Rise of Gru screening is both mocking the ritual of fandom and genuinely enjoying a movie from their childhood. To someone outside the loop, Minions memes can read as pure brainrot, random yellow guys everywhere for no reason. To people in on it, that randomness is the point.

The Minion is a blank, smiling vessel you can project any bit onto, and the more inappropriate the setting, the better it lands. [1][2][3]

The receipt

Original post, embedded from Tiktok, linked and credited. Visuals on this page are shown for commentary and identification.

The receipts

Documented, dated uses of “minions” — each quote is verbatim from the linked source.

Every quote above passed the same verification gate this site publishes under: real source, real date, copied verbatim. See the editorial policy.

How it spread

Minions memes have had multiple viral peaks driven by TikTok. The biggest was the #GentleMinions craze around the July 2022 release of Minions: The Rise of Gru. Over 500 videos used the #GentleMinions hashtag within days, racking up over 27 million plays, and when you fold in related tags like #minions2 and #riseofgru, the videos accounted for nearly 1.25 billion plays.

The trend measurably moved real-world behavior: 34% of the movie's US opening-weekend audience was between 13 and 17 years old, 90% was under 25, and the film pulled $125 million over the four-day holiday weekend, the biggest domestic debut for an animated family film during the pandemic. It got chaotic enough that some UK cinemas banned moviegoers in suits from attending screenings, citing disruptive behavior, which only made the meme more legendary.

The format proved it had staying power when the Crucified Minion took over TikTok in 2024. The trend started with a May video from TikTok pastor @pastorjoshpan, who used an animation of a crucified Minion as an attention hook before pivoting to a sermon: 'A Minion didn't die for you...

But Jesus did.' The video went viral and spawned countless imitators, some following the same script, others making compilations and reactions, with comment sections flooded with lines from the original.

Reactions split between people who found it sacrilegious or excessively trivializing and people who were earnest about it, arguing the Crucified Minion was a way to spread the gospel and teach the Bible in a digestible way using a recognizable character. That tension, is this a joke, is this ministry, is it both, is exactly what keeps Minions memes circulating.

Every few years the internet finds a new, weirder thing to do with the yellow guys, and each wave introduces the format to a fresh audience.

Variants & examples

Fully mainstream and multi-generational; ironic suit-posting and absurd edits read as funny, while posting unironic Facebook-style Minion quotes is the version people mock.

• “The boys and I are going full GentleMinions for the premiere, suits, ties, the whole thing.”Group chat planning an ironic theater trip
• “I just got served a Crucified Minion sermon on my FYP and honestly I watched the whole thing.”Talking about TikTok's algorithm
• “A Minion didn't die for you, but Jesus did, type 'wonderful saviour' and smash that subscribe button.”Quoting the viral pastor script as a joke
• “The cinema literally banned people in suits because of the Minions meme, I'm crying.”Reacting to the UK theater bans
• “Minions memes are the one format that somehow never dies, they just get weirder.”Commenting on the meme's longevity

Frequently asked