About

Black Man With Puffed Up Cheeks / Holding In Cough or Big Winnn Holding Breath refers to an image of rapper and influencer Big Winnn wearing red sunglasses and holding in a large breath, his cheeks extremely puffy as if resisting the urge to cough, laugh or react in an extreme way. The earliest known upload of the image as a meme is a post to Reddit in November 2020, inspiring memers to use it in image macros and as a reaction image in the following months and years.

Origin

On an unknown date prior to 2018, Instagram^[2] rapper and influencer Big Winnn (@bigwinnnnnn now, @bigwinnn at the time of posting) posted an image to his Story of himself in red sunglasses holding back a huge breath, causing his cheeks to puff up comically (shown below).

It is unclear who first used the image as a meme. One of the earliest examples was posted to Reddit's /r/meirl^[6] board on November 27th, 2018, used to describe the feeling of holding in a cough, gaining over 40,700 upvotes in just over three years (shown below).

Spread

On March 20th, 2020, Redditor LMAO-69-420 posted a meme using the image to /r/meirl^[5] to describe the feeling of holding in laughter, gaining over 24,200 upvotes in just under two years (shown below).

On November 21st, Redditor cvzmir posted the image to /r/funny,^[1] captioned, "The reaction right after stubbing your toe on the coffee table," and gained over 8,600 upvotes in just over a year.

On November 21st, Twitter^[7] user @wavydavhie posted a meme referencing Harry Potter using the image of himself, gaining over 500,000 likes and 89,000 retweets in just over a year (shown below, left). On November 22nd, Big Winnn posted the same meme to Instagram.^[3] On the same day, Imgur^[4] user shuuyacine posted a version of the meme using the image to describe stubbing your pinky toe, gaining over 104,000 views and 2,200 upvotes in the same span of time (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References