"DANK" came from weed slang meaning high quality, borrowed by internet culture (~2013) to describe memes that were weird, ironic, and deliberately low-effort in an artful way.

Born on 4chan and Reddit, dank memes thrive on absurdism, in-group humor, and post-irony — the joke is often that it is a meme.

Every meme follows a lifecycle: born niche → goes viral → normies find it → declared dead → ironic revival.