Check Your Smeeg

About

Check Your Smeeg refers to a fictional household product called Smeeg that users need to check 10 times with a Smeegometer before each use for their safety. The product came to Redditor qbzs in a dream about a controversy surrounding Smeeg where people were making "check your smeeg" memes joking about ignoring the 10 times rule despite it being unsafe, inspiring qbzs to create a number of detailed photoshops depicting the memes and a fake news headline about the Smeeg company denouncing them. The meme became popularized on the Reddit board /r/196 in November 2021.

Origin

On November 7th, 2021, Redditor qbzs posted a collection of eight images to /r/196^[1] titled "i had a weirdly specific dream about a controversy relating to memes about some sort of household product called Smeeg so i had to recreate it." The first image shows a fake CNN Business headline about a product in a spray bottle called Smeeg and explains how people have been making memes about its seemingly arbitrary "check 10 times before each use" rule (shown below). The Smeeg company denounces the memes and reiterates how important it is to check your Smeeg, although does not elaborate on why it's dangerous not to do so.

The next slide shows a Big Brother Orders meme telling people to check their Smeeg 10 times before use, an example of the memes the Smeeg company denounced (shown below, left). The next slide shows a photoshopped tweet from the Smeeg company (@sm33gCo) showing people how to check their Smeeg and reiterating the importance of the act (shown below, right).

The remaining five images consist of recreations of "check your Smeeg" memes meant to show how people are making fun of the 10 times rule despite the warnings, as well as an image describing how to check your Smeeg (shown below). The post gained over 6,100 upvotes in two days. It was also posted to /r/thomastheplankengine,^[2] gaining over 2,000 upvotes in the same span of time.

Spread

Following the popularity of the Reddit posts, people began creating new "check your Smeeg" memes playing into the dream, particularly on the /r/196 subreddit. For example, on November 8th, Redditor 418puppers posted a meme about what might happen if you only check your Smeeg once to /r/196^[3] (shown below, left). On the same day, Redditor TiloDroid posted a meme showing Squidward sleeping happily after checking his Smeeg 10 times to /r/196,^[4] gaining over 1,300 upvotes in under a day (shown below, right).

On the same day, backforsecondz posted a video meme to /r/196^[5] about SmeegCo making a bad product, gaining over 2,600 in under a day (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References