The Graham memes almost entirely trade on the sculpture's unsettling appearance. Users paste his cratered head into normal photographs, pair straight-on portraits with punchy captions about horror movies and awkward family reunions, and lean on adoption gags like the "Welcome home son" reply that first blew up on Twitter6. Reaction posts swung between honest disgust at his flattened face and extra nipples and darker jokes about what evolution would actually build if humans had to survive head-on collisions3.

Tumblr artists ran with the reverse angle, redrawing Graham as an anime bishonen and a dreamy Disney prince, playing his ugliness as a punchline about how thirst posts really work6. The joke never had to reach far because Patricia Piccinini and the Transport Accident Commission genuinely wanted people to stare at him, so the meme mostly amplified the campaign's own premise into absurdity1. BuzzFeed captured the initial mood with a headline about people "freaking out" over the sculpture on the same afternoon it went live5.

The typical Graham meme is either a straight photograph of the sculpture with a punchline caption or a photoshop that drops him into an unrelated scene, family portrait or dating-app screenshot6. Captions often lean on the "Welcome home son" adoption joke first popularized by @KeklePop, or play the reverse angle by writing him up as a heartthrob, boyfriend or celebrity crush6. Because the TAC published high-resolution 360-degree shots of the sculpture as part of the MeetGraham launch, creators had unusually clean source imagery to work from, which helped the earliest photoshops look polished1.