Obama sends 'bro' Biden a meme for his birthday

The Obama presidency may have ended but the bromance between Barack Obama and Joe Biden lives on.

Former US President Barack Obama has wished his former Vice President Joe Biden happy birthday in a meme featuring both of them.

The former commander-in-chief posted an image on Twitter which showed himself during his 2014 State of the Union address with Biden in the background, smiling and pointing, accompanied by subtitles for the pair's imagined conversation.

It has since been liked more than 1.4 million times in less than 20 hours.

The tweet acknowledges a meme which grew during the Obama administration, imagining the banter between the two men. Particularly, that the president would often have to be a restraining influence on his impulsive right-hand man.

It reads:

"ME: Joe, about half way through the speech I'm gonna wish you a happy birth--

"BIDEN: IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!

"ME: Joe. Happy birthday to @JoeBiden, my brother and the best vice president anybody could ever have."

Throughout the Obama-Biden years photographers often captured the chemistry and friendship shared by the president and his second-in-command.

Those images gave birth to hundreds of tweets, posts and jokes circulating on the internet about the professional president and his impetuous best friend, with both men admitting in interviews to have enjoyed seeing them.

Although, while in office, President Obama shared relaxed images with Biden to promote causes they supported, this looks to be the first time Obama has tweeted his own version of the joke, and social media users were stunned.

"He finally made his own meme." posted one excited Twitter user. "I miss the Obama / Joe friendship memes so much it almost hurts."

Another tweet read: "You are, by far, the coolest president in the history of planet Earth."

However, some remarked the Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin memes were funnier.

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Meme orgins

One of the earliest incidences of the Obama-Biden meme can be traced back to April 2014 with a text-only version of a fictional dialogue between the two men.

Then, in September 2014, Getty Images released a picture of Joe Biden staring pensively out of the window during a White House summit with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in the wake of political unrest in the East European country.

In December 2014 Twitter user Michael Doran tweeted the photograph and called on his followers to come up with humorous and fitting internal monologues, promoting a series of captioned images.

In 2016, the day after Republican candidate Donald Trump was declared president-elect of the United States, Sky News journalist Mollie Goodfellow posted the same image of Biden gazing out the window captioned with a mock dialogue about the next occupant of the Oval Office.

Goodfellow later tweeted a picture of Biden captioned with a scheme to throw the ball at Trump. The tweets gained more than 50,000 retweets each and the Obama-Biden meme phenomenon began to gain momentum.

Since then, hundreds of people have generated the imagined exchanges of the pair and Biden has embraced his popularity with appearances in political sitcom Parks And Recreation and alongside Veep's Julia Louis-Dreyfus.