About

Boo Boo The Fool is a reference to the character Boo-Boo Bear from the television series Yogi Bear. It became a popular term in black communities as slang for "idiot" or "stupid person" before becoming the target of image macros in the mid-2010s.

Origin

Boo Boo Bear first appeared in The Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958 before joining the show Yogi Bear in 1961.^[1] Though Boo-Boo would often attempt to dissuade Yogi Bear from stealing picnic baskets, his ineffectiveness often made him an unwitting accomplice in the crimes, thus categorizing him as a fool. On April 30th, 2003, Urban Dictionary user Mr. Terrence L. Trezvant uploaded the most popular definition of "Boo Boo the Fool" (shown below).

Spread

Over the next decade, several other definitions were submitted to Urban Dictionary, all giving similar definitions. On April 30th, 2011, public radio program A Way With Words^[2] looked into the origin and traced its possible start to characters like "Bobo the Clown," further hypothesizing that "Boo Boo the Fool" comes from a Latin root balbus, meaning “stammerer."

The phrase began growing more popular online in 2016. On January 26th, Tumblr blkproverbs^[3] posted "Do I look like Boo Boo the Fool?" citing it as a Black Mother Proverb, in a post that gained over 7,400 notes. On April 21st, Tumblr user fonzworthcutlass^[4] posted an image of Barack Obama looking at himself in the mirror thinking "I'm boo boo the fool" with the caption "when u swallow ur pride and double text, but u get no reply." The post gained over 96,000 notes.

This likely sparked a surge of image macros around the "boo boo the fool" character. On January 15th, 2017, an image of a sad clown captioned "I am boo boo the fool" was posted to /r/blackpeopletwitter^[5] and gained over 5,000 points, leading to newfound online interest in the phrase.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References