About

Art on the Side of Carnival Rides refers to a series of memes ridiculing bizarre artworks that resemble art found on the side of carnival rides due to their themes and execution. Started by a viral tweet in November 2022, the cliche and meme maintained prevalence online through early 2023.

Origin

At carnivals, airbrush artworks featuring bizarre combinations of characters, people and popular culture phenomena can often be found decorating rides (examples shown below).^[1]

On November 19th, 2022, Twitter^[2] user @RICKYRAGE tweeted a bizarre airbrush artwork of aliens experimenting on Elvis, captioning it, "This the art they be having the side of those carnival rides." The tweet (shown below) garnered over 8,700 retweets and 101,000 likes in six months. The post subsequently saw further spread through reposts on many other major social media platforms.

Spread

Starting in February 2023, similar memes were posted on iFunny, Twitter and other sites. For example, on February 19th, 2023, iFunny^[3] user imsofunnylaughplease posted an artwork of Peter Griffin and Brian from Family Guy, pairing it with the caption from the tweet (shown below, left). On May 8th, Twitter^[4] user @blizzy_mcguire posted a collage of images (shown below, left) with a similar caption that gained over 5,300 retweets and 50,100 likes in two weeks (shown below, right).

In May 2023, more memes pairing the caption with bizarre art were shared on Twitter, iFunny and other platforms. For example, on May 20th, 2023, Redditor Longbeacher7070 posted a promotional poster for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia using the caption, with the post garnering over 25,300 likes in /r/memes^[5] in three days.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References