About

Behind the GIFs is a community on Reddit that curates a series of illustrated comics offering humorous and fictitious backstories to a variety of animated GIFs that are frequently shared on the website.

Origin

On January 1st, 2014, Tumblr^[1] user pizza-omelette posted several illustrated comic panels depicting the events leading up to an infomercial fail GIF of a man dropping a bowl of snack food (shown below). In the next five days, the post garnered upwards of 197,000 notes.

On the following day, the /r/BehindTheGIFs^[2] subreddit was launched for Redditors to submit humorous images explaining the stories behind animated GIFs. In the first four days, the subreddit gained over 31,000 subscribers.

Spread

The same day /r/BehindTheGIFs was created, BuzzFeed^[3] highlighted several notable examples from the subreddit. Also on January 2nd, 2014, actor Wil Wheaton tweeted about /r/BehindTheGIFs.

On the following day, the Internet humor blog Pleated Jeans^[5] reblogged several images from the subreddit. On January 6th, the Internet news blog UpRoxx^[4] published an article about /r/BehindTheGIFs, noting the Tumblr post that inspired its creation.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References