About

Airport Snape, also known as Air Snape, is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photograph of an airline ticket agent resembling the character Severus Snape as portrayed by actor Alan Rickman in the Harry Potter film series. The captions typically feature flight-related jokes containing various references to the fantasy franchise.

Origin

On November 27th, 2012, Redditor mygoodness82 submitted a photograph of a American Airlines employee David Dolci standing at a ticketing counter at the New York La Guardia Airport to the /r/pics^[6] subreddit (shown below).

Spread

On December 13th, Redditor Candlegary submitted a Harry Potter-themed captioned version of the image titled "Flying with Air Snape" to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[11] subreddit, where it gained over 2,700 votes (96% upvoted) and 290 comments prior to being archived (shown below, left). On the following day, Redditor Corysherpard117 posted another captioned version to /r/AdviceAnimals,^[12] referencing Snape's relationship with Harry Potter's father (shown below, right).

That month, the original photograph was reposted on Tumblr,^[3] where it garnered more than 146,000 notes over the next three years. On April 23rd, 2013, Redditor XxDailyDreamxX reposted the original photo to /r/funny,^[7] where it gathered upwards of 1,600 votes (78% upvoted) and 190 comments prior to being archived. In June 2015, American Airlines posted a photograph to Facebook^[9] of Dolci pointing a wand at a young woman wearing a Harry Potter costume (shown below). In the coming days, the news sites People^[1] and Metro^[10] published articles about the airline ticketing agent.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References