Good Morning Meme
Good morning memes are greeting images sent to family and friends at the start of the day, usually warm rather than sarcastic. They carry a hello, a small joke or a bit of encouragement, and they are shared far more often than they are posted publicly.
Make your own good morning meme
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The good morning meme collection
Almost every other page about this subject is a wall of sunrise photographs with a script font over them. This grid is the other tradition: captionable frames that let you send a greeting with something of your own in it. They are ordered deliberately. The first frames are safe to send to a parent, and the last two have teeth.
Read that order before you pick. A good morning image usually travels to somebody who is not fluent in meme formats, which is the opposite of the audience for most templates. If your aunt has to work out what a frame refers to, it has failed as a greeting no matter how funny it is to you.
Which one to use
The decision is about tone and audience, not about the joke. Sort by who is opening it: family thread, friends, or a group that will enjoy something with an edge.
| The situation | Use | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| A plain warm greeting, no joke attached | Morgan Freeman Good Luck | A calm, familiar face that carries sincerity without looking like a chain message. The safest frame here for relatives. |
| Somebody in the house made coffee for everyone | Good Guy Greg | Built for small unprompted kindnesses. Top box is the situation, bottom box is the generous thing they did anyway. |
| You have nice news to open the day with | Professor Farnsworth Good News Everyone | The announcement frame. It works because the character always says it too loudly, which suits minor news. |
| The morning genuinely went well | Today Was A Good Day | Understated satisfaction. Use it for the ordinary win: no traffic, seat on the bus, nobody messaged before nine. |
| A kind gesture that came out awkwardly | Good Guy Socially Awkward Penguin | Warmth plus embarrassment in one frame. Good for the relative who means well and phrases it strangely. |
| A very small domestic favour | Good Guy Pizza Rolls | Deliberately trivial. The joke is treating an act of no importance as heroic, so keep the stakes tiny. |
| It started well and then the day arrived | Good Then Bad | Two panels, one reversal. Put the pleasant thing first or the reversal has nothing to reverse. |
| A morning with one good half and one bad half | Good Bad | A verdict frame rather than a story frame. Best when both halves are true at the same time. |
| A greeting with a joke folded into it | Good Fellas Hilarious | Laughter that could turn at any second. Use it in a group chat that will read the second meaning. |
| The person announcing their 5am productivity | I Love The Smell Of Napalm In The Morning | Cheerful menace. The only frame here with an edge, so aim it at the habit and not at a named person. |
Captions that work
Greeting captions have one rule that office-humour captions do not: they have to still be kind after the joke lands. Aim the joke at the morning, at the alarm or at yourself. Never at the person receiving it, because they opened it before they were fully awake and had no chance to defend themselves.
- greetinggood morning the kettle is already on
- greetingrise and shine the birds have been at this since five
- greetinggood morning to everyone except my alarm
- familymorning I have made enough coffee for the whole house
- familygood morning, have a lovely day and text your mother
- greetingit is a beautiful morning I decided this before looking outside
- greetinggood morning may your bus be early and your queue be short
- encouragementnew day, clean slate yesterday is not invited
- encouragementgood luck today you have done harder things than this
- familymorning, all I have put the washing on and I would like credit
- greetinggood morning to the early risers and condolences to the rest of us
- greetinggood morning that is the entire message, no favour attached
Where good morning memes come from
This is the only subject in our whole library where the biggest tradition is not the one meme sites document. The best evidence for how large it is came from an unexpected direction. On 22 January 2018 the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Newley Purnell reporting that Google researchers in Silicon Valley had been trying to work out why so many smartphones half a world away were freezing up. The answer was good morning images. The article reported that one in three smartphone users in India run out of space on their phones daily, and that the cause was an accumulation of sun-dappled flowers, adorable toddlers and birds sent as cheery greetings.
That is the real good morning meme: sincere, high volume, image-and-text, and almost entirely absent from meme template archives because nobody archives a picture of a rose that says have a blessed day. It is worth knowing before you assume the format is a joke format. For an enormous number of people it is simply how the day starts.
The frames in this grid come from a different lineage, the western advice-animal era of the early 2010s. Good Guy Greg is the clearest example. Know Your Meme records the template photograph being uploaded to the image remixing site Canvas on 26 April 2011 with the description that this is Good Guy Greg, and the first captioned macro appearing on 19 May 2011 with a caption about sleeping on your couch and making breakfast. He was built as the mirror image of Scumbag Steve, and a February 2011 precursor called Generous Jeff had already tested the idea. Breakfast, incidentally, was in the very first caption, which is a large part of why the character still suits mornings.
Two frames here are film and television imports. The napalm line comes from Apocalypse Now, released in 1979, spoken by the character Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall and written by John Milius. The American Film Institute placed it twelfth in its list of the hundred greatest movie quotes. The announcement frame is Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, whose catchphrase about good news is delivered at a volume no news ever justifies, which is precisely why it works for saying that the kettle has boiled.
Limits and etiquette
Three matched templates are missing from the grid on purpose. One featured a serving head of state, which does not belong on a page about greeting your relatives. One was a Pepe the Frog frame; the character was appropriated by extremist accounts and added to a widely used hate symbol database in 2016, and although the database itself notes that most uses are innocent, that is not a thing to send to somebody who might recognise it and misread you. The third we could not identify confidently enough to caption honestly.
One warning about a frame that did make the grid. Good Guy Greg is holding a rolled cigarette, and the character comes out of stoner humour. Most people will read the caption first. Some relatives will read the cigarette first. If that is a risk in your family, the penguin does the same job.
The bigger etiquette question is frequency. The storage story above is not an insult aimed at anyone, it is what happens when a warm habit runs daily across hundreds of millions of phones. A good morning image is a gift when it is occasional and specific, and a chore when it arrives every day with nothing in it. If you are going to send one, put something in it that only you would have written.
All frames here are third-party material, hosted for captioning only. Rights holders can use the takedown policy at /dmca/.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a single good morning meme template?
No. Good morning is a greeting tradition rather than a format, so it borrows friendly frames. The ten here are the ones that suit a greeting instead of an office joke.
Which frame is safest to send to family?
Morgan Freeman Good Luck or the Good Guy Socially Awkward Penguin. Both read as sincere at a glance, which matters when the person opening it is not fluent in meme formats.
Why are so many good morning images associated with India?
In January 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported that Google researchers traced widespread phone storage problems in India to the volume of good morning pictures being shared.
Is it fine to send one of these every day?
To a group chat, once in a while. Daily images are the reason people mute family threads, and the storage story above is the same habit at national scale.
Where is the napalm line from?
The 1979 film Apocalypse Now, spoken by the character Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall. The line was written by John Milius and ranks twelfth on the American Film Institute list of movie quotes.
Who is Good Guy Greg?
An advice animal character from 2011, built as the opposite of Scumbag Steve. Note that he is holding a rolled cigarette, which some relatives will read before they read the caption.
Why does this collection only have ten frames?
Three matched templates were unsuitable for a page about greeting people you like. The reasons are set out in the limits section rather than padding the grid.