If you've been online in the last couple of weeks, you've probably seen puns, memes, poems, and tweets all about one thing: "cracking open a cold one with the boys."
The meme has rocketed itself to the public's attention recently, despite the fact that it originally started with a Facebook page in 2015. Back then, it had a pretty standard (albeit bigger than normal) meme audience. Now it's hard to spend 10 minutes on social media without seeing a COACOWTB meme somewhere.
The cause for the meme's sudden revival seems to be an overnight growth of American fans and an increasing Australian circulation. The meme has taken over Aussie culture so much so that there's a belief that "cracking open a cold one with the boys" is an entirely new meme spawned from the good ol' Aussie tropes of drinking, larrikinism, and friendship.
Influential Australian meme pages like Yeah the Boys and Shit Memes all shared COACOWTB memes in late May, causing a host of copycat accounts to generate their own attempts.
As the meme continued to grow once more, it started being spliced with other current-day trends, like remixes of Childish Gambino's incredibly catchy "Redbone."
What Redbone would sound like when cracking open a cold one with the boys in the bathroom of a house party
Or the bizarre "student athlete text message" meme.
If my girl 🙋🏽💕 and my boys 👨👨👦👦 were both dying 😭😵 and I could only save one 👆🏼catch me at my girls funeral ⚰️ cracking open a cold one 🍻
Then all it needed was a few well-placed, influential Twitter accounts to take on the meme.
my favorite sex position is cracking open a cold one with the boys
fuck the boys i'm cracking open a cold one w the girls and the gays
it’s scientifically proven
Which meant it found its way onto Twitter-for-the-masses.
now he's falling asleep and she's calling a cab while he's Cracking Open a Cold One with the Boys and she's taking a drag
I love that cracking open a cold one with the boys meme even if I don't have any boys to crack open a cold one wit… https://t.co/qgbI16iC0R
Meme encyclopedia KnowYourMeme links the resurgence of COACOWTB to a January 2017 YouTube video called "Cracking open a cold one with the boys 1 million times," in which, you guessed it, a can is cracked open, overlapping, 1 million times.
View this video on YouTube
"1 Million Times" is an incredibly successful YouTube page that uploads clips of things being played over and over again till the loops reach 1 million plays.
"I'm not sure how much influence the video had on the meme – however, the meme was very obscure/unknown until about February this year," "1 Million Times" director George Bizniz told BuzzFeed News.
"My only regret is that it wasn't an alcoholic beverage – and there are no boys. I need to remake the video for legitimacy really."
A subreddit was also set up for the meme, and from there it was shared to influential Reddit pages r/MemeEconomy and r/DankMemes. (Think of these subreddits as places that decide if a meme deserves to take off or not.)
And this Google Trends spike shows you that the attention for cold ones with the boys has been very sudden and very real.
The admins of the now hugely followed COACOWTB Facebook page, who are all from Australia and based in Townsville, said they started the page as a joke and that it is very much Aussie-created.
BuzzFeed News asked the admins if the decision to start creating memes without labeled beers was because of the sudden spike in US interest in the meme.
So there you go. That's all you need to know about cracking open a cold one with the boys. May you crack on into eternity.
