About

Baby Stephen A. Smith refers to videos of ESPN sports commentator Stephen A. Smith filtered through the Snapchat Baby Filter, giving him a babyish face as he delivered some of his more memorable rants.

Origin

The Snapchat Baby Filter was introduced on May 8th, 2019, and on May 14th, 2019, @_TheRealDears_ posted a video of one of Smith's rants about the New York Knicks with the filter, gaining over 16,000 retweets and 42,000 likes (shown below).

Spread

Over the following week, multiple Twitter users also posted videos of Smith with the filter. These include multiple videos posted by users @Ryan_Cortes (example shown below, top) and @themikefoss, whose example gained over 32,000 retweets and 126,000 likes (shown below, bottom). The wave of videos led to a Twitter Events page.^[1]

The popularity of the videos on Twitter was joked about on the ESPN sports talk show High Noon (shown below, top). On May 24th, Smith himself responded to the memes by posting a video of himself with the filter saying he found the memes "hilarious," though notably, he called them "me-mes" (shown below, bottom).

This led to a Twitter Moments^[2] page, which covered people joking about Smith's incorrect pronunciation of "meme." These include tweets by @JustinMorris,^[3] which gained over 160 retweets and 1,700 likes (shown below, left) and a tweet by @TrentonJocz which joked that "me-me" is also how star baseball player Bryce Harper pronounces "meme" (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References