About

Apu Takes A Bullet is an image macro and object labeling meme template in which the character Apu from The Simpsons is seen jumping in front of a bullet that is being shot at the person behind him.

Origin

The episode that the meme comes from is called Homer and Apu, which aired as season 5, episode 13 of The Simpsons. The scene, which features cameo actor James Woods, has him getting robbed in the Kwik-E Mart, with Apu jumping in front of the bullet. The scene was uploaded to YouTube on October 4th, 2015 by the channel McClarver Productions^[1], where it would gain over 730,000 views in seven years (shown below).

The still image becoming a meme wouldn't happen for three more years, with the first instance of it being uploaded to Imgur on July 11th, 2018, by the account EdgyCreativeName^[2], with the meme itself being against the 'weird nerds' who always defend Elon Musk from people tweeting about the Rich, taking place before Musk even became one of the richest men in the world (shown below).

Spread

The meme would see little use for a few years, only cropping up whenever something related to Musk would happen, which would cause people to post it in response. This, however, would change in mid-2022, when people started to adapt the meme to be usable in other circumstances. This can be seen in the Tumblr upload by user Ratgoo^[3], in which the gun is labeled 'valid criticism' and the person the 'weird nerds' are defending is Harry Potter (shown below).

A few months later, on September 7th, 2022, the Twitter user @notbind^[4] would use the template as a way of batting down the trolls who defend Windows despite the many flaws that it has, uploading his variation of the meme as a QRT to a thread about Windows removing capability with legacy hardware (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References