Meme Star Tank Sinatra Is a Long Island Dad

George Resch wakes up, drinks coffee, and checks his Instagram like the rest of us. Except his Instagram account has more than 1.3 million followers.

The Long Island dad, better known as Tank Sinatra, started his account about three years ago, making memes. Tank says he finds the human condition hilarious, the fact that we think we're so evolved, yet we all get jammed up by the same things.

A few years ago, he offered to make content for Insta-star The Fat Jewish. And before long, Tank's account was on fire, too. The Fat Jewish started taking Tank's content and tagging and posting it. All of a sudden, Tank Sinatra had 300,000 followers.

And that's when Tank started churning out some of his best work. Two winters ago he Photoshop-ped a picture of The Rock onto Barack Obama's face and captioned it The Rock Obama. The Rock reposted it, which Tank calls a monumental Instagram experience.

Leonardo DiCaprio inspired another winner. When everyone was wondering if Leo would finally win an Oscar, Tank made a meme with a photo of a very calm DiCaprio, and wrote "Leonardo DiCaprio should win an Oscar for acting like not winning an Oscar doesn't bother him."

So what makes a meme Tank Sinatra worthy? A cute animal and a celeb never hurt. Tank says he doesn't like joking about alcohol, drugs, sex, farts—9-year-old humor. He says life is complicated and prefers digging into the corners where he sees people struggling and bringing some humor there.

Tank's all-time favorite post was about Matthew Perry from Friends. Tank says he took a picture of Perry looking bad and captioned it "When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year."

Tank got started in comedy well before Instagram was around. He said that a joke was his best defense mechanism growing up as a self-proclaimed chubby kid in Commack. He said he was fearful that people were going to make fun of him, so he just beat them to the punch, a skill he sharpened over time.

And he has turned that skill into a second career. A fencing salesman, Tank spends 90 percent of his day in the car and creates most of his meme there, often at the local 7-Eleven. 2017 has provided him with some great comedic content, but it's also had its fair share of tragedies.

To counter that, this fall, Tank started a second Instagram account, @tanksgoodnews, to show off all the good things happening in our world. It already has more than half a million followers. Tank says Tank's Good News was born specifically out of Hurricane Harvey, which was a devastating storm in Texas.

Tank was blown away by the amount of good that came out of the devastation, and the number of people stepping up to help their neighbors.

Earlier this year, Tank published his first book, Happy Is the New Rich, sharing a decade of his life's mistakes and learnings.

While all of his followers and Insta-fame have made him happy, they haven't exactly made him rich. Just because people know who he is, doesn't mean that he is able to convert that into dollars.

Casper sent him a free mattress in exchange for an ad, but more often than not, the offers are lousy. And that's why Tank also works at Brandfire, a creative agency in Manhattan. He collaborates with other meme masters Adam the Creator, Black Humorist, and The Daily Lit.
The hope here is to turn their meme skills into moneymakers. They've started developing an app, a documentary, and a television show. But they're never too busy for a laugh.

While we there, Tank saw a picture of a muscular monk sweeping and couldn't help making a meme that said "Damn, bro. How much can you Zen?"

Tank is also a recovering alcoholic. He says he talks openly and honestly on social media about his sobriety so that other people don't feel so alone.

--ALISON MORRIS