About

Can I Copy Your Homework? refers to a series of jokes made on Twitter that compares two pieces of pop culture, one of which appears to have nearly completely imitated the first. The joke references a grade school practice wherein one student asks another if they could copy their homework assignment, and the other obliges on the condition that they change a few things so that the first student’s homework isn’t technically plagiarized, resulting in two nearly identical assignments.

Origin

The earliest known tweet to employ the joke format was tweeted by @essentialpeach^[1] on October 18th, 2016, when she tweeted images of several films ripping off popular animated movies by Dreamworks, Disney, and Pixar such as Up and Kung Fu Panda (shown below).

Spread

A few versions of the joke were posted in the coming months, but did not start getting popular until December 18th, 2016, when a Harry Potter fan account, @castofhp,^[2] tweeted an image of musician Ed Sheeran and “Ron Weasley” actor Rupert Grint standing next to each other looking very similar, captioned “‘can I copy your homework?’/ ‘yeah just change it up a bit so it doesn’t look obvious you copied’ / ‘ok’” (shown below). The tweet has gained nearly 24,000 retweets and 32,000 likes as of January 6th, 2017.

Following @castofhp’s post, the joke began spreading to other fandoms as people adapted it to various pop culture references, centering the joke on how the imitated piece of pop culture was always superior to the imitation. One popular joke centered around the 90s sitcom Friends was suspiciously close in plot and concept as the sitcom Living Single, which featured an all-black cast of 20-somethings.

This example drew the attention of The Daily Dot,^[3] who wrote about the ensuing conversation about Living Single and Friends as well as other examples of the meme. The jokes were also compiled in a Twitter Moment^[4] on January 5th, 2017.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References