About

Dog Getting Blamed, also known as Bad Dog, is a cartoon by comic artist Scott Bieser in which a person is scolding a dog for breaking their dinnerware while a cat, the real perpetrator, grins in the background seemingly getting away with breaking the plates. Starting in 2017, the image began seeing use as an exploitable object-labeling meme format in which various captions are added to the dog, cat and plates.

Origin

In December 2002, Rational Review News Digest published a cartoon by artist Scott Bieser^[1] in which a person blamed a dog, captioned "Free market," for the Enron Scandal, represented by broken dinnerware, while the real perpetrator, a cat captioned, "Regulatory game-playing," can be seen grinning in the background (cartoon shown below).

On November 10th, 2017, Redditor Inilitus then posted a template based on the comic, editing out some of the broken shards and changing the text to simply say "bad dog." The post (shown below) gained over 90 upvotes in the /r/memetemplatessubreddit^[2] in five years.

Spread

Prior to February 18th, 2018, an unknown Facebook group posted an object-labeling meme based on the template that blamed atheism for mass shootings. On February 18th, an unknown Redditor posted the image to the /r/insanepeoplefacebook subreddit, with the image also later getting posted to /r/terriblefacebookmemes^[3] and /r/memeeconomy,^[4] /r/TheRightCantMeme^[5] and other subreddits (shown below).

Following the viral spread of the post, the format saw increased usage in meme communities on Reddit. For example, on February 18th, 2018, Redditor^[6] Jarl_Swagruuf posted a Prequel meme that gained over 660 upvotes in five years (shown below, left). Also that day, an unknown Redditor posted a meme about Minecraft YouTubers that received over 3,700 upvotes in /r/dankmemes^[7] in five years (shown below, right).

The meme format maintained a limited presence online in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References