About

Dangling Boris is a photoshop meme spawned from a photograph of London Mayor Boris Johnson stuck in the mid-air on a zip line during his public appearance at an event in Victoria Park.

Origin

On August 1st, 2012, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson was scheduled to test out a 320 meter (1050 feet) zip line in Victoria Park, where the Olympic Games were being held. Approximately three quarters of the way across, Johnson lost his momentum and got stuck, dangling 10 meters (33 feet) above the ground while holding on to two Union Jack flags.^[1] As the mayor waited for assistance to arrive, numerous spectators and news reporters snapped photos and video of the trapped mayor, tweeting them with the hashtags #DanglingBoris^[3] and #DangleBoris.^[11]

Spread

Eclipsing with the heightened presence of photographers and journalists who were covering the London Olympics events near Victoria Park, Johnson’s zip line blunder quickly drew attention from the news media outlets, including Reuters^[4], NPR^[5] and The Telegraph^[6] among others.

As the photos began making their rounds on Twitter, @sunny_hundal tweeted^[10] a transparent template of the dangling Mayor Boris, which was retweeted at least 61 times. Other Twitter users followed by sharing their photoshopped images with the #DanglingBoris hashtag and later that day, the single topic blog #dangleboris^[13]was launched.

A compilation of the photoshopped images were posted on the Huffington Post^[7] three hours after their first report^[8] on the incident. Additional compilations appeared on the Mirror, Londonist^[17], News.com.au^[12], Liberal Conspiracy blog^[9], the GlobalPost^[14], NBC New York^[15] and Uproxx.^[16] The music blog NME^[18] posted their own series as well, adding Boris into famous album covers (shown below, bottom row).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References