Deer When Two Tons of Steel Are Coming at Them

About

Deer When Two Tons of Steel Are Coming at Them refers to a series of memes about deer presumably abandoning all precautions when crossing a road and standing still when a car is coming at them at high speed. Spawned by a viral tweet, the meme experienced several periods of popularity on Reddit and TikTok between 2020 and 2022.

Origin

On November 5th, 2019, X / Twitter^[1] user @KylePlantEmoji made a joke about deer reacting to the presence of a hunter versus deer endangering themselves by crossing a highway. The post (shown below) received over 1,000 reposts and 7,000 likes in four years.

On April 3rd, 2020, Redditor /u/RegularNoodles posted a two-panel Shrek meme that garnered over 58,000 upvotes on Reddit's^[2] /r/dankmemes^[2] in three years (shown below).

Spread

In April 2020 and the following months the joke saw viral popularity in the /r/memes and /r/dankmemes subreddits and was spread further through reposts on iFunny, Instagram and other sites.

On April 16th, 2020, Reddit^[3] user /u/VINNY115 posted a two-panel meme that received over 28,100 upvotes in the /r/memes subreddit prior to being removed (shown below, left). On March 23rd, 2020, Redditor /u/weedprocessor posted a "Suicide Is badass" meme that gained over 22,100 reposts in Reddit's^[4] /r/dankmemes in four years (shown below, right).

In September 2022, the format regained popularity on TikTok. For example, on September 14th, 2022, TikTok^[5] user @russu_advil posted a meme that received over 290,000 views and 43,000 likes in one year (shown below, left). On October 31st, 2022, artist @artsukown posted a TikTok^[6] meme that received over 1.1 million views and 226,000 likes in one year (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References