Cheap Joke

About

Cheap Joke is the name of an animated comedy video in which one man tells another a your mom joke in a public bathroom, with the main character reacting by hysterically laughing while his face contorts in a gruesome grimace. In 2023, the animation achieved virality as a video caption meme format, primarily on TikTok.

Origin

On July 28th, 2011, animator Ian Miller uploaded a dark comedy animation titled Cheap Joke to YouTube.^[1] In the video, a man named George is washing his hands and adjusting his hair in a public restroom, while another man named Eddie, off-screen, tells him a dirty "What Do You Call?" joke, with the punchline being "your mom." After a short pause, George reacts by laughing hysterically, his face contorting in a series of unpleasant grimaces, before composing himself and commenting, "Good one, Eddie." The video (shown below) garnered over 6.4 million views in 13 years.

Spread

Prior to May 2023, the video saw moderate spread online through reposts. For example, on January 27th, 2022, Redditor Jimmy_changa505 reposted the video to the /r/Weird^[2] subreddit, where it received over 4,300 upvotes in two years.

On May 29th, 2023, TikTok^[3] user @roebourne69420 posted a 23-second-long clip of the man laughing, which received over 2.8 million views and 428,000 likes in one year (shown below).

On August 22nd, 2023, TikTok^[4] user @phxnkpl6ya posted the earliest discovered meme that used the video as a caption format. The video caption meme (shown below, left) received over 384,000 likes in ten months. Later that day, TikTok^[5] user @xssume posted another caption meme that garnered over 111,000 likes in ten months (shown below, right).

More versions of the meme followed in August 2023 on TikTok, with the format then spreading beyond the platform. For example, on January 6th, 2024, Redditor Secret_Entry_4627 posted a meme captioned, "POV: I'm in the bathroom after my lobotomy." The post (shown below) received over 5,600 upvotes in the /r/distressingmemes^[6] subreddit in six months.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References