Condescending Wonka / Creepy Wonka

About

Condescending Wonka, also known as “Creepy Wonka”, is an advice animal image macro series featuring a screen capture of Gene Wilder in the 1971 musical Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The captions typically contain patronizing and sarcastic remarks.

Origin

Creepy Wonka image macros began as sexual double entendres related to various types of candy. The first image macro (left) was submitted to Quickmeme^[3] with the caption “Close the door / I’ll show my my fudge packing unit” on March 2nd, 2011. It was subsequently posted to the /r/pics subreddit^[6] the same day, where it was marked as spam for breaking the “no comics/macros” rule. People began referring to the series as “Condescending Wonka” when a derivative (right) submitted to Quickmeme^[7] on October 11th, 2011, captioned with “Oh, you just graduated? / you must know everything.” The image was posted to Reddit^[8] the same day, and reached the front page of the /r/pics subreddit prior to being marked as spam for breaking the “no comics/macros” rule as well.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

The image comes from a scene in the 1971 musical Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in which Willy Wonka, played by Gene Wilder, asks the children if they would like to see a new candy he is working on called “The Everlasting Gobstopper.” The image is also used in a You Must Be New Here image macro.

Spread

The web culture blog The Bigster^[9] posted a compilation of Creepy Wonka derivatives on October 12th, 2011. On November 27th, 2011, Redditor chicagowillbeours posted a thread titled “Let’s all agree to change his name to ‘Condescending Wonka’” that reached the front page of the Advice Animals subreddit. A Quickmeme^[2] page for “Condescending Wonka” was created on November 28th, 2011 and accumulated over 800 submissions within 6 weeks.

On January 8th, 2012, Redditor hannibl posted a photo of a Wiemaraner dog with the caption “Oh, you run a chocolate lab? / I am a chocolate lab.” The thread reached the front page and accumulated over 8,500 up votes within 5 days.

Creepy Wonka macros have since spread to FunnyJunk^[5] and the Condescending Wonka macros can be found on Tumblr^[4] under the “#condescending wonka” tag. The original Creepy Wonka Quickmeme^[1] page accumulated over 6500 images in 9 months.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search queries for “creepy wonka” and “condescending wonka” picked up in October of 2012, the same month the first Condescending Wonka macro was submitted to Quickmeme.

External References