Hindenburg Explosion

About

The LZ 129 Hindenburg was a German passenger airship which exploded over New Jersey on May 6th, 1937.^[1] The disaster was famously observed by, among others, radio journalist Herbert Morrison, who very melodramatically described it in a narration famously played together with a separate filming of the event, forming what has since become the definitive audio-visual account. Morrison's speech contains the now-famous phrase "Oh, the humanity" which has since become a commonly-repeated quote used to express shock and awe at disastrous events.

"Oh, the Huge Manatee" meme

Oh, the Huge Manatee is likely the longest-running online joke derived from the disaster, making a phonetic and often visually-accompanied pun based on Herbert Morrison's famous statement, which is usually used to mock melodramatic emotional displays resembling his as made in response to decidedly less extreme events.

Object-labeling use

Starting in 2018, the disaster found new invocation as a two-panel object labeling template showing the Hindenburg airship explosion. In the first panel, the airship is flying intact and is given a label, and the second panel showing the explosion is labeled something that causes the first label to fall apart. The most popular iteration of the meme parodies conservatives, with the first panel labeled "Unlike you snowflakes I am not so easily triggered," with the second panel labeled something relatively innocuous that causes intense conservative backlash.

On June 5th, 2018, Redditor^[2] Bricks564 posted the earliest known two-panel object labeling image macro of the disaster employing the This Nigga Eating Beans template in /r/MemeEconomy, gaining over 23,000 points (shown below).

On June 12th, 2018, Imgur user SomeThingsNeverDie^[3] posted the first "Unlike you snowflakes" variation referencing conservative backlash to the #TakeAKnee protests, gaining over 140 points (shown below, left). On September 26th, 2019, Redditor anotherstraydingo posted the template referencing Greta Thunberg in /r/politicalhumor,^[4] gaining over 22,000 points.

The template inspired other edits using shots of the Hindenburg. For example, on November 12th, 2018, Facebook^[5] user The People's Kuhai posted a variation using "Women In Video Games" as the second panel (shown below, left). On January 17th, 2019, Redditor garbage-account-123^[6] posted a meme referencing the Gillette Best a Man Can Be Ad in /r/memes-of-the-dank (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References