Miley Cyrus

2013public figureclassic

Published September 6, 2026

Miley Cyrus, the former Disney Channel star turned pop provocateur, became one of the most heavily memed celebrities of the early 2010s after her August 2013 MTV VMAs performance with Robin Thicke touched off a firestorm of twerking GIFs, foam finger jokes and reaction shots. The night generated 4.5 million tweets and spawned reaction templates that shaped celebrity meme culture for years afterward.

celebrity scandal memesawards show memesearly 2010s memescelebrity reaction memesmoral panic memes

Overview

The Miley Cyrus meme complex covers a cluster of images, GIFs and hashtags built around the singer's public reinvention from Hannah Montana into an adult pop star. The core visual vocabulary comes from a two song block at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, where Cyrus performed "We Can't Stop" with dancing teddy bears before stripping to a nude bikini, grabbing a giant foam finger and grinding on Robin Thicke during "Blurred Lines"1. Screengrabs of her tongue out pose, her latex two piece and the shocked crowd cutaways became the reusable ingredients that fans, brands and rival celebrities kept remixing for the next several years.

The formats that stuck were the reaction GIF set BuzzFeed compiled from the broadcast, which pulled 1.8 million views in under 24 hours2, and a still of Will Smith and his family with their mouths hanging open, which the internet wrongly attached to the Cyrus performance instead of Lady Gaga's opening number it actually captured3. Later add ons included the "Wrecking Ball" nude video from September 2013 and a googly eyed childhood selfie Cyrus posted to Instagram in 2014 that fans photoshopped onto her most controversial pictures4. The through line is a celebrity whose own image maintenance kept feeding fresh material into the meme mill.

Tone wise, the Miley Cyrus meme sits between mockery and celebration. Twitter jokes from actors like James Van Der Beek and Kelly Clarkson set an early register of bewildered comedy5, while hashtag campaigns such as #MileyAssSmallerThan and later the fake AIDS prank #CureForMiley pushed into meaner territory6.

Origin & Background

Platform
MTV VMAs broadcast / Twitter and Tumblr (viral spread)
Date
2013

Miley Ray Cyrus first entered the meme conversation as the title character of Disney Channel's Hannah Montana, which aired between 2006 and 20116. The transition point that made her a meme subject rather than just a tabloid figure was the June 3, 2013 release of "We Can't Stop," the lead single from Bangerz, whose chorus lyric was widely misheard as "dancing with Molly," a reference to MDMA that her producer initially denied and that Cyrus later half confirmed in a Rolling Stone interview7. Genius notes the track peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and was later certified five times platinum by the RIAA8.

The meme itself crystallized on August 25, 2013, when Cyrus opened the MTV VMAs with the teddy bear number and then the Thicke duet. ABC News described her running the foam finger along her body and delivering "the mother of all twerks" while cameras cut to Will Smith and his family with their mouths open1. NBC News reported that the VMA broadcast peaked at 306,100 tweets per minute during her set, pummeling the previous year's 98,300 tweet peak and edging past the Super Bowl blackout that February9. That single performance is the origin document that everything else in the Miley Cyrus meme catalog references back to.

How It Spread

Twitter did most of the immediate lifting. USA Today rounded up celebrity reactions within hours, including Kelly Clarkson calling the show "pitchy strippers," Kevin Hart joking that Miley "better get a damn pregnancy test" and Alexa Chung describing a nightmare about "a child in latex underwear grinding on Beetlejuice"5. NBC News clocked 4.5 million mentions of Cyrus in tweets during the 9 to 11 pm ET airing, more than Justin Timberlake's 2.9 million despite his reunion with NSYNC on the same show9. BuzzFeed's fifteen GIF roundup of the performance hit 1.8 million views in under a day and became the reference sheet everyone else pulled from2.

Tumblr and Reddit picked up the second wave. Tumblr's curated LOL tag featured multiple pieces of Miley fan art with 100,000 plus notes each, and the /r/mileycyrus subreddit crossed 10,000 subscribers by the following year6. On Twitter, users pushed the hashtag #MileyAssSmallerThan more than 166,000 times in 24 hours, generating image macros that compared her behind to raw chicken and to King of the Hill's Hank Hill6. The Chicago Tribune archive shows the coverage jumping to MSNBC's Morning Joe, NBC's Today and the Parents Television Council within a day, which pushed the story out of pop coverage and into general news10.

Cyrus kept giving the meme new material. The "Wrecking Ball" video that premiered on September 9, 2013 pulled 12.3 million VEVO views in 24 hours, breaking the previous record6, and its sledgehammer imagery became its own remix template. On October 2, 2013 a 4chan /b/ poster launched the #CureForMiley prank, trying to convince fans she had AIDS6. In late November 2013 the same board's culture pushed her to the top of TIME magazine's Person of the Year poll using automated Facebook vote scripts, briefly seating her above Edward Snowden before TIME's editors picked their own winner6. In September 2014, Cyrus posted a googly eyed childhood photo to Instagram that fans photoshopped onto her most notorious public moments, which she then reblogged to her 13 million followers6.

How to Use This Meme

The reusable pieces of the Miley Cyrus meme are the tongue out headshot, the foam finger still, the Will Smith family reaction cutaway and the Wrecking Ball sledgehammer frame. Common conventions include pairing the Will Smith shot with any absurd or embarrassing thing you want to react to, dropping the foam finger frame under captions about being over enthusiastic, and pasting the googly eyed childhood face onto tabloid photos to comment on her adult persona6. The Wrecking Ball frame typically gets captioned with something the poster claims to have destroyed, from relationships to work projects.

Frequently Asked Questions

Miley Cyrus

2013public figureclassic

Published September 6, 2026

Miley Cyrus, the former Disney Channel star turned pop provocateur, became one of the most heavily memed celebrities of the early 2010s after her August 2013 MTV VMAs performance with Robin Thicke touched off a firestorm of twerking GIFs, foam finger jokes and reaction shots. The night generated 4.5 million tweets and spawned reaction templates that shaped celebrity meme culture for years afterward.

celebrity scandal memes awards show memes early 2010s memes celebrity reaction memes moral panic memes

Overview

The Miley Cyrus meme complex covers a cluster of images, GIFs and hashtags built around the singer's public reinvention from Hannah Montana into an adult pop star. The core visual vocabulary comes from a two song block at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, where Cyrus performed "We Can't Stop" with dancing teddy bears before stripping to a nude bikini, grabbing a giant foam finger and grinding on Robin Thicke during "Blurred Lines"1. Screengrabs of her tongue out pose, her latex two piece and the shocked crowd cutaways became the reusable ingredients that fans, brands and rival celebrities kept remixing for the next several years.

The formats that stuck were the reaction GIF set BuzzFeed compiled from the broadcast, which pulled 1.8 million views in under 24 hours2, and a still of Will Smith and his family with their mouths hanging open, which the internet wrongly attached to the Cyrus performance instead of Lady Gaga's opening number it actually captured3. Later add ons included the "Wrecking Ball" nude video from September 2013 and a googly eyed childhood selfie Cyrus posted to Instagram in 2014 that fans photoshopped onto her most controversial pictures4. The through line is a celebrity whose own image maintenance kept feeding fresh material into the meme mill.

Tone wise, the Miley Cyrus meme sits between mockery and celebration. Twitter jokes from actors like James Van Der Beek and Kelly Clarkson set an early register of bewildered comedy5, while hashtag campaigns such as #MileyAssSmallerThan and later the fake AIDS prank #CureForMiley pushed into meaner territory6.

Origin & Background

Platform
MTV VMAs broadcast / Twitter and Tumblr (viral spread)
Date
2013

Miley Ray Cyrus first entered the meme conversation as the title character of Disney Channel's Hannah Montana, which aired between 2006 and 20116. The transition point that made her a meme subject rather than just a tabloid figure was the June 3, 2013 release of "We Can't Stop," the lead single from Bangerz, whose chorus lyric was widely misheard as "dancing with Molly," a reference to MDMA that her producer initially denied and that Cyrus later half confirmed in a Rolling Stone interview7. Genius notes the track peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and was later certified five times platinum by the RIAA8.

The meme itself crystallized on August 25, 2013, when Cyrus opened the MTV VMAs with the teddy bear number and then the Thicke duet. ABC News described her running the foam finger along her body and delivering "the mother of all twerks" while cameras cut to Will Smith and his family with their mouths open1. NBC News reported that the VMA broadcast peaked at 306,100 tweets per minute during her set, pummeling the previous year's 98,300 tweet peak and edging past the Super Bowl blackout that February9. That single performance is the origin document that everything else in the Miley Cyrus meme catalog references back to.

How It Spread

Twitter did most of the immediate lifting. USA Today rounded up celebrity reactions within hours, including Kelly Clarkson calling the show "pitchy strippers," Kevin Hart joking that Miley "better get a damn pregnancy test" and Alexa Chung describing a nightmare about "a child in latex underwear grinding on Beetlejuice"5. NBC News clocked 4.5 million mentions of Cyrus in tweets during the 9 to 11 pm ET airing, more than Justin Timberlake's 2.9 million despite his reunion with NSYNC on the same show9. BuzzFeed's fifteen GIF roundup of the performance hit 1.8 million views in under a day and became the reference sheet everyone else pulled from2.

Tumblr and Reddit picked up the second wave. Tumblr's curated LOL tag featured multiple pieces of Miley fan art with 100,000 plus notes each, and the /r/mileycyrus subreddit crossed 10,000 subscribers by the following year6. On Twitter, users pushed the hashtag #MileyAssSmallerThan more than 166,000 times in 24 hours, generating image macros that compared her behind to raw chicken and to King of the Hill's Hank Hill6. The Chicago Tribune archive shows the coverage jumping to MSNBC's Morning Joe, NBC's Today and the Parents Television Council within a day, which pushed the story out of pop coverage and into general news10.

Cyrus kept giving the meme new material. The "Wrecking Ball" video that premiered on September 9, 2013 pulled 12.3 million VEVO views in 24 hours, breaking the previous record6, and its sledgehammer imagery became its own remix template. On October 2, 2013 a 4chan /b/ poster launched the #CureForMiley prank, trying to convince fans she had AIDS6. In late November 2013 the same board's culture pushed her to the top of TIME magazine's Person of the Year poll using automated Facebook vote scripts, briefly seating her above Edward Snowden before TIME's editors picked their own winner6. In September 2014, Cyrus posted a googly eyed childhood photo to Instagram that fans photoshopped onto her most notorious public moments, which she then reblogged to her 13 million followers6.

How to Use This Meme

The reusable pieces of the Miley Cyrus meme are the tongue out headshot, the foam finger still, the Will Smith family reaction cutaway and the Wrecking Ball sledgehammer frame. Common conventions include pairing the Will Smith shot with any absurd or embarrassing thing you want to react to, dropping the foam finger frame under captions about being over enthusiastic, and pasting the googly eyed childhood face onto tabloid photos to comment on her adult persona6. The Wrecking Ball frame typically gets captioned with something the poster claims to have destroyed, from relationships to work projects.

Frequently Asked Questions