Carl the Hedgehog

About

Carl the Hedgehog refers to an exploitable image of a hedgehog named Carl paired with the text explaining that the image will only be posted once. The image spawned a series of derivative posts featuring Carl coming back for various reasons and updates on his further life.

Origin

On October 1st, 2014, Pixabay^[1] user amayaeguizabal uploaded several photographs of a hedgehog sitting on a porch.

On February 28th, 2019, Redditor^[14] Lawvamat posted a cropped image of the hedgehog to me_irl subreddit, writing what the hedgehog's name was Carl and that he would only be posted once, and urging other Redditors to say hi. The post followed the trope of It Is Wednesday, My Dudes and Reginald posts and gained over 48,800 upvotes in one week.

Spread

On March 1st, the image was reposted by popular Instagram meme account i_have_no_memes96_v2 (326,000 likes gained in one week),^[2] along with several other notable pages.^[3][4]

In the following week, multiple posts about Carl were posted on /r/me_irl^[5] subreddit and on Instagram^[6], with many notable versions made by Instagram user dinopox (examples shown below).^[7]

Carl the Hedgehog Travelling Chain

On April 24th, 2019, an unknown Redditor posted an image of Carl the Hedgehhog captioned "this is Carl. he is travelling from all subreddits" to /r/memes subreddit. The image urged other users to repost it in other Reddit communities while tagging the picture with the subreddit names. In the following hours, the image was reposted to /r/teenagers,^[8] /r/PewdiepieSubmissions,^[9] /r/TrebuchetMemes^[10] and other subreddits, with many posts, including the first one, later removed due to violating subreddit rules.

On several subreddits, posts expressing annoyance with the chain were made, including notable posts on /r/okbuddyretard,^[11] /r/ShitPostCrusaders^[12] and /r/coaxedintoasnafu^[13] subreddits (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References