The Singing Shark

About

The Singing Shark is a 4-pane comic featuring an illustrated shark singing the phrases "I'm a shark! Suck my diiiiick!" The comic inspired an exploitable series, including various animals, people and objects with speech bubbles containing the snowclone "I'm a X" and the phrase "Suck my dick!"

Origin

The earliest known instance of the original comic strip was uploaded to YouTube^[9] on December 23rd, 2006 with no mention of its creator. The art is commonly attributed to Chris VanGompel's now-defunct webcomic Hockey Zombie^[1], which featured a comic titled "The Singing Shark"^[7] on February 20th, 2007, in celebration of Discovery Channel's Shark Week^[8], an annual programming event celebrating various species of sharks.

Spread

On February 15th, 2007, five days before "The Singing Shark" was featured on Hockey Zombie, a thread was posted to the eBaum's World forum^[3] requesting the comic. On February 23rd, user zlopez replied to the thread with a link to the comic hosted on the image sharing website ImageShack. On March 17th, a flash animation based on the comic was shared on deviantArt.^[6] Ten days later, a definition for the phrase "I'm a Shark!"^[4] was submitted to Urban Dictionary, citing Hockey Zombie as its origin.

The earliest archived appearance of the phrase on 4chan was posted in a pick-up line thread to the /b/ (random)^[5] board on May 7th. On July 14th, the comic managed to earn a "GET" by being the 3,300,000th post submitted to 4chan's /b/ board. Throughout 2008 and 2009, parodies of the comic and accompanying catchphrase appeared on FARK^[10], the off-topic forum WTF.com^[11], gaming forum Explosm.net^[12], the IGN forums^[13] and Destructoid.^[14] In 2010, a Facebook fan page^[15] was created for the phrase "Suck my sick, I'm a shark", which received 1781 likes as of August 22nd, 2011. The phrase is sometimes used as a tag on Tumblr^[15] as an insulting retort.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References