Part of the appeal of some classic memes lies in their potential to be misinterpreted, to be taken from their original context and reinterpreted to take on a life of its own online. And that is certainly the case with “Success Kid,” a photo of an infant on the beach who, we have found out from his family in later years, was joyfully eating a fistful of sand. Not that the original context exactly matters. In the eyes of internet users everywhere, that pose looks more like a supremely self-satisfied fist pump, and, as such, “Success Kid” has been used millions of times to illustrate the real or imagined wins of people the world over.
The photo itself dates from 2007 and is an image taken by mother Laney Griner of her son, Sammy. In 2015, years after Sammy had become an internet sensation, the family made the news by fronting a crowdfunding campaign to raise money so that Sammy’s father, Justin, could receive a kidney transplant operation (per The Verge). Thanks in part to Sammy’s fame as “Success Kid,” the campaign gained traction and was ultimately successful.
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Sammy is now a teenager, and is, of course, totally unrecognizable. In an interview with BuzzFeed, he described his life as a meme, stating, “It’s weird to be famous as a baby.”
