About

Animals Being Jerks is a subgenre of animal-related online media in which various creatures are portrayed as being socially ill-mannered.

Origin

The single topic Tumblr blog “Animals Being Dicks”^[7] was launched on July 11th, 2011, with the first post highlighting an animated GIF of two dolphins colliding in mid-air (shown below). Within the first two years, the post gained over 470 notes.

Spread

On November 9th, 2011, the Internet humor blog Slacktory^[11] published a video montage of misbehaving animals (shown below), receiving more than 700,000 views and 200 comments in the next two years.

On July 21st, 2012, Animal Planet^[9] introduced a playlist of mischievous animal videos titled “Animals Being Jerks.” On December 1st, MSN^[10] published a slideshow highlighting several animated GIFs of ill-mannered animals. On February 21st, 2013, the subreddit /r/AnimalsBeingJerks^[8] was launched by Redditor tara1, which garnered upwards of 74,000 subscribers in the next four months. On March 30th, YouTuber Olynoyem uploaded a montage titled “Animals Being Jerks” (shown below).

Notable Examples

Derivatives

On February 21st, 2013, the same day that /r/AnimalsBeingJerks was launched, Redditor Kijafa simultaneously created the first spin-off subreddit /r/AnimalsBeingDicks^[3], accumulating more than 10,400 subscribers in the same time frame. Over the course of the next few months, several similar subreddits were launched, including /r/AnimalsBeingBros,^[2] /r/AnimalsBeingDerps,^[4]/r/PlantsBeingJerks^[5] and /r/AnimalsBeingAnimals.^[6]

Search Interest

External References