Every widely used joke format eventually stops working, often within weeks. The cause is exhaustion of surprise rather than any objection to the format itself.
The format is a setup the audience already knows
A meme works by supplying a familiar structure so that only the variable part needs attention. The viewer recognises the frame instantly and reads the substitution as the joke.
That efficiency is the appeal. It compresses a joke into an image or a few seconds because the setup is carried by recognition rather than by explanation.
It is also the vulnerability, since a structure that depends on recognition depends on the audience not yet having seen every possible substitution.
Predictability arrives faster than fatigue
Once a format has circulated widely, viewers can anticipate the shape of the payoff before reading it, and an anticipated joke produces no reaction.
Formats die at the point where the frame becomes more prominent than the substitution, which happens sooner the more heavily a format is used.
This is why a format can feel exhausted within days on a fast-moving platform and last for years in a smaller community, since the pace of exposure differs enormously.
Wider adoption accelerates the ending
Formats begin in smaller communities where they carry a signal about who is in on the joke. Spreading into general circulation removes that signal.
Adoption by brands and institutions marks the end more reliably than anything else, because it demonstrates that the format has become legible to everyone.
The people who used the format first typically abandon it at that point, which removes the source of new variations that had kept it alive.
Ironic reuse is a distinct final stage
Formats often return briefly as a joke about their own obsolescence, where the humour comes from using something everyone recognises as finished.
That stage is short and does not restore the format, since the joke depends on the format being dead rather than on it working.
Formats that reach this point tend to disappear entirely afterwards, because there is no remaining position from which to use them sincerely.
Why some formats survive
Formats with a genuinely open variable last longer, because the number of possible substitutions is large enough that predictability arrives slowly.
Templates tied to a specific image tend to fade faster than structural formats, which can be rebuilt with new material and effectively refresh themselves.
The longest-lived formats are usually those simple enough to be reconstructed from memory, since they persist as a shared shape rather than as a particular file.