About

"Are You Not Entertained?" is a memorable quote from the 2000 historical drama film Gladiator that is used by the original poster (OP) as a retort to lukewarm reception of his or her contribution. It is often featured as the caption in reaction images wherein the subject is posing with outstretched arms, in a similar vein to the "Come at me Bro" image macro series.

Origin

The line comes from a scene in Gladiator in which the protagonist Maximus Decimus Meridius (played by Russell Crowe) defeats several enemies in a gladiator pit and dramatically exclaims “Are you not entertained?” before the audience (shown below).

The quote was prominently featured in the introduction of Jay-Z's 2003 rap song "What More Can I Say." The image macro featuring the screenshot from Gladiator is believed to have originated as early as late 2007 on 4chan, with its earliest known appearance on the home design blog Home Designing^[7] (shown below) on September 26th, 2009.

Spread

On April 25th, 2010, DeviantArtist^[8] Astaldo Fea uploaded an illustration of Maximus titled “Are You Not Entertained?” (shown below, left). On November 8th, 2011, FunnyJunk^[1] user mrgreeny posted a rage comic featuring a screenshot of the Gladiator scene captioned with the quote (shown below, right), which received more than 26,000 views and 1,200 up votes in the next two years.

On May 10th, the quote was added to the Gladiator entry on the trope database website TV Tropes^[2] as an example of the “Chewing the Scenery”^[4] trope. On June 16th, 2011, an image macro featuring a photograph of a Vancouver Stanley Cup rioter wielding a hockey stick in front of a heavily damaged storefront (shown below) was submitted to the /r/pics^[9] subreddit. Prior to being archived, the post garnered upwards of 1,300 up votes and 80 comments.

On August 20th, 2012, Redditor TomSellecksStash submitted an animated GIF of the Gladiator scene in a /r/reactiongifs^[5] post titled “When my 1 yr old is still crying after I put on all the cartoons and music he loves” (shown below). Prior to being archived, it gathered over 2,000 up votes and 50 comments.

On April 22nd, 2013, a Facebook^[2] page titled “Are You Not Entertained?” was launched. On May 15th, Redditor herplderpster submitted an image macro of a man dressed in a Batman costume with outstretched arms in a /r/funny^[6] post titled "are you not entertained?" (shown below), which received more than 15,800 up votes and 280 comments in the first four months.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References