Who Are Bones Malone And The Spooky Boys?

In the smoke-filled backroom of a speakeasy in 1920s Chicago, a tough dame wonders if the jig is up. Two wise guys have cornered her and want to know where the money went, but she doesn’t have any answer that won’t lead to her spending the night in the cold waters of Lake Michigan. Suddenly, the barroom doors fling open and three skeletons burst in: it’s none other than Bones Malone and the Spooky Boys! In a well-lit living room in 2020s Chicago, a Tumblr user adds a witty comment, and suddenly, they become gods of a sort to the rest of us mortals online.

Who Are Bones Malone And The Spooky Boys?

The three skeletons wielding tommy guns in this iconic neo-noir meme format seem to be illustrated in the style of a 1920s or 1930s pulp fiction comic. Posters on Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube and essentially every other platform the undead mobsters have visited speculate wildly about their capabilities and their story.

Where Did Bones Malone Come From?

While the original source of the illustration cannot be ascertained, the earliest posting of the meme was posted on Tumblr on March 8th, 2018. Two different users added captions providing the name of the crew (“Bones Malone And The Spooky Boys”) and their catchphrase (“RATTLE EM BOYS!”)

“Bones” Malone was also the name of a real jazz musician, who played with the Blues Brothers and in the Saturday Night Live band.

After the posting of the original Bones Malone picture on Tumblr, Twitter user @VoicesByZane gave Bones Malone a voice and a backstory, modeled off of 1930s radio plays.

Subsequent animators have paired that audio with original artwork, fully fleshing out the world of Bones Malone.

How Do People Post Bones Malone?

People generally post Bones Malone/Rattle ‘Em Boys in a way that respects the noir-style setting of the meme and enlarges the lore around the character. The “rattle” in “Rattle ‘Em Boys” presumably refers to both the sound of a machine gun firing and of a skeleton’s bones rattling.

Bones Malone is also used as a reaction image, often when a user jokingly wishes the undead mobsters could punish a poster who's done something bad.

Why Do People Post Bones Malone?

The cultural heritage of film noir and detective fiction is one of the strongest and most ripe-for-parody traditions around. For many posters, the image of Bones Malone and the Spooky Boys brought to mind radio plays and detective novels from their grandparents’ youth, and the spooky spoof of adding a skeleton to these tales was too good to resist.

For more information on this topic, check out the KnowYourMeme entry for Bones Malone And The Spooky Boys