Crying Duck

About

Crying Duck is a meme that shows a sped-up animated video of a ducking crying and pounding his hands on the ground. The reaction video of the Crying Duck is often used to mock someone for throwing a tantrum online. The meme originates from a children's YouTube video, with the clip of the duck crying being posted to Discord and eventually back to YouTube in 2020.

Origin

The kid's YouTube^[1] channel "My Dog Chocolo" posted a video titled "ALL MY LITTLE DUCKS" on September 20th, 2016. The video gathered over 1 million views in 7 years. The relevant clip begins at the 49-second timestamp (seen below).

The earliest known post showing the crying duck set to a sped-up version of the song "As The World Caves In" by Matt Maltese is an October 18th, 2020 post by YouTuber^[2] Tomzuilian, who claims to have sourced the video from an unknown Discord channel. The post gathered over 700,000 views in four years (seen below).

Spread

On November 21st, 2020, YouTuber^[3] Andrejus Dovidaitis posted an extended and remastered version of the meme, gathering over 2 million views in three years (seen below).

On February 17th, 2022, YouTuber^[4] 🫶 Raynbøw 🫶 posted an edit of the aforementioned post, captioning it, "Crying Duck Remaster but I made it worse," and gathering over 800,000 views in two years (seen below, left). On February 18th, 2022, YouTuber^[7] Pao’s Lower Quality Productions posted a "Normal" version of the meme, gathering over 320,000 views in two years (seen below, right).

Many internet users also post the meme to mock someone for throwing a tantrum online, as seen in posts by Aliceorsumthing^[5] and Pollo^[6] that mock other YouTubers for their response to backlash (seen below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References