Bad Joke Trex

About

Bad Joke Trex, also known as Dinosaur Standup or Trex Standup, is an exploitable image macro series depicting a T-Rex standing on a stage performing a comedy act while telling bad jokes to an unamused crowd. The original comic comes from The Tasteless Trex webcomic series. It’s typically used as a format for telling tasteless jokes or making puns where the word bubbles are changed to whatever the creator photoshops in. There are multiple versions of the comic, some with the crowd staring blankly and others with the dinosaurs laughing.

Origin

Around February 2016, the website dedicated to the comic was created at thetastelesstrex.com,^[1] and several of the original comics were published on the site around the same time. The first comic published references Bill Cosby’s sexual assault cases (seen below).

The concept for the Tasteless Trex webcomic series originated from a similar comic created by The Oatmeal, ^[2] titled, “Tyrannosaurus Standup,” which predates the former version (shown below).

Spread

Before the webcomic was revamped into various memes as a template, the original Tasteless Trex comics were heavily spread around the web in 2016. On Imgur,^[3] user SketchyStraya posted a gallery of the comics on March 11th, 2016. The gallery (one example below) has since been viewed nearly 250,000 times and received almost 15,000 points.

On March 23rd, 2016, another collection was uploaded to 9GAG^[4] under the Funny section receiving over 16,000 points and 323 comments.

Redditor^[5] 5 finger death punch reposted the Imgur gallery to the r/Funny subreddit on March 23rd, 2016, where several people discussed the origin of the comic and the similarities it shared with The Oatmeal version. This post was also upvoted over 4,600 times.

On the Argentine-based social networking site Taringa!, numerous versions of the comic have been posted over the years, featuring reworked versions of the originals from the Facebook^[6] page Filosorexmx, who also adapted the format for their own jokes. Taringa^[7] user ArlexRios uploaded the first example of this on August 31st, 2016 (seen below).

On December 28th, 2018, Instagram^[8] user o_dinosaurakos created their page featuring another variant of the Trex comic with Greek and English jokes appearing in the captions of the comic. The first post (shown below) received 928 likes.

In late 2019 and early 2020, several Redditors began using the template to create jokes of their own, posting memes to various subreddits on the platform. Redditor^[9] eleniyt75 posted one such example (seen below) on April 15th, 2020, to the r/memes sub, receiving over 70,000 upvotes 400 comments and several Reddit awards.

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References