About

Condescending Wonka is an advice animals image macro series featuring a screen capture of actor Gene Wilder in the 1971 musical Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. As its name suggests, the captions can be characterized as patronizing and sarcastic.

Origin

The image comes from a scene in the 1971 musical Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in which Willy Wonka, played by Gene Wilder, asks the children if they would like to see a new candy he is working on called "The Everlasting Gobstopper." On the web, Wilder's picture from the film was introduced in January 2011 through an instance of the "You Must Be New Here" reaction face.

The image soon became associated with other captions, from which emerged the advice animal series "Creepy Wonka" featuring various double entendres with allusions to candies or confectioneries. The earliest known image macro (shown below, left) was submitted to Quickmeme^[3] with the caption "Close the door / I'll show my my fudge packing unit" on March 2nd, 2011. It was subsequently posted to the /r/pics subreddit^[6] the same day, where it was marked as spam for breaking the "no comics/macros" rule.

The series was renamed "Condescending Wonka" for the first time in October 2011 after it was paired with the caption "Oh, you just graduated? / you must know everything" in an instance submitted to Quickmeme.^[7] The image was posted to Reddit^[8] the same day and reached the front page of the /r/pics subreddit prior to being marked as spam for breaking the "no comics/macros" rule as well.

Spread

On October 12th, 2011, the web culture blog The Bigster^[9] posted a compilation of Creepy Wonka derivatives. On November 27th, 2011, Redditor chicagowillbeours posted a thread titled "Let's all agree to change his name to 'Condescending Wonka'" that reached the front page of the Advice Animals subreddit. A Quickmeme^[2] page for "Condescending Wonka" was created on November 28th, 2011 and it has accumulated more than 127,217 submissions as of June 2012.

On January 8th, 2012, Redditor hannibl posted a photo of a Weimaraner dog with the caption "Oh, you run a chocolate lab? / I am a chocolate lab." The thread reached the front page and accumulated over 8,500 up votes within 5 days.

Creepy Wonka macros have since spread to FunnyJunk^[5] and the Condescending Wonka macros can be found on Tumblr^[4] under the "#condescending wonka" tag. The original Creepy Wonka Quickmeme^[1] page had accumulated over 6,500 images in 9 months.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search queries for "creepy wonka" and "condescending wonka" picked up in October of 2011, the same month the first Condescending Wonka macro was submitted to Quickmeme.

External References