Fifteen years ago, the American head of the post-invasion Iraqi government, Paul Bremer, made the biggest announcement of his life.
A day earlier, US forces had captured Saddam Hussein. On 14 December 2003, Bremer called the cameras in, stood before the world and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.”
The footage, nearly 15 years to the day, is now part of the internet’s newest meme. But it has little to do with the 2003 invasion, the fallout or Bremer himself.
“Ladies and gentlemen we got him” (or “Ladies and gentlemen we got ‘em”) has become a video format which rolls in whenever someone gets pranked or owned online; it’s soundtracked by the song Baby I’m Yours, a 2010 minor hit by French musician Breakbot.
And like all good memes, it manages to be both beautifully simple and terribly complex.
— Will (@wills_account) November 15, 2018
On the one hand, it’s comedy 101. The opening images or video are the set-up; Bremer’s announcement – that we have indeed “got him” – is the punchline. It’s elementary. Viscerally funny. Isn’t all humour, since time immemorial, really just “we got him”?
But there are more confusing layers that do need explaining. The next thing that happens is a distorted, overly loud mix of the song – a staple of post-ironic meme humour. It’s funny because it’s bizarre.
Many, but not all, versions then add footage of Swat teams knocking down doors and swarming a house, to underline just how thoroughly the person has been rinsed.
According to website Know Your Meme, the idea was seeded in April, when a YouTube user used the Bremer clip – but with no music and no video editing – to make a joke about the song Despacito.
Once combined with Breakbot, the meme began to take off in the middle of the year.
In one example from July, someone tricked the popular video game streamer Ninja by referencing “ligma” – a mysterious but fictional disease in the “updog” mould.
Another roasted Jordan Peterson for failing to name any – any – female author.
And in a beautiful coincidence, the meme picked up steam as it neared the 15th anniversary of the original 2003 clip.
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Bremer told the Daily Beast in October his granddaughter noticed he had become a meme, and showed him.
“I’m not a meme guy,” he said. “So I was watching them with great curiosity … Many times I couldn’t figure out what the connection was with the announcement. How are the words fitting into the memes?”
But nevertheless its popularity grew.
It became especially popular in Australia at the end of the year, meshing perfectly with the political madness of 2018.
Examples included Victorian MP Tim Wilson’s fight on Twitter about whether or not he was a member of “the government”:
— Eleanor Robertson (@marrowing) December 15, 2018
Dave Sharma’s Wentworth byelection loss:
my first foray into what has become my favourite meme of the year pic.twitter.com/bu59PA2NOw
— Naaman Zhou (@naamanzhou) December 14, 2018
And the 15th anniversary of Mark Latham’s election as Labor leader:
— nondescript twiitteer user (@sh*tpostRodeo) December 15, 201815 years ago today, Paul Bremer called a press conference that would go down in the annals.
All of us remember the moment the world found out Mark Latham had just become leader of the Labor Party pic.twitter.com/ohqZatA5qk
As we move further away from its origins and the cultural memory of the Iraq war, what happens next is up for debate.
Younger meme-makers may find it increasingly less funny. Or a major political party will undoubtedly use it and it will die. But there’s reason to believe it will stick around, at least in some form.
“We got him” seems to be, at least in America, deeply embedded in the collective psyche.
Barack Obama said it when navy seals shot Osama bin Laden in 2011 (“Looks like we got him”), and the mayor of Boston uttered it when they captured Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in 2013.
Either of these could have easily been used instead of Bremer’s remarks – and perhaps they will be used in some future iteration – but the randomness of his appearance in the original meme is part of its beautiful humour. It doesn’t matter who Bremer is, or if people remember why he said it. All we know, and all that matters, is that we got him.
