About

"Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy" is a rhyming expression used to describe tasks that are simple or undemanding, which has been featured in films, television shows and image macro captions circulated within ironic meme communities online.

Origin

According to Wiktionary,^[1] the British detergent brand Sqezy began using the catchphrase in product commercials sometime in the 1950s. However, an article published on the news site Newser^[4] in August 2009 noted that the commercials only used the phrase "easy Sqezy," not "easy peasy" (shown below).

Spread

On July 22nd, 2002, the comedy film Austin Powers in Goldmember was released, in which the line was uttered by the character Nigel Powers (shown below).

On September 11th, 2006, a thread about the expression was submitted to the WordReference Forums.^[5] On September 4th, 2009, the British comedy film In the Loop was released, in which two British operatives argue about a course of action, with one saying "it will be easy peasy lemon squeezy," to which the other replies "it will be difficult difficult lemon difficult" (shown below).

On November 4th, Urban Dictionary^[6] user nick_f submitted an entry for the catchphrase, citing a "British detergent commercial" as the origin of the expression (shown below).

On May 5th, 2016, Redditor Siziph submitted a photoshopped picture of Bernie Sanders as a hacker titled "Romanian hacker known as Bernie '4chan' Sanders hacked Clinton server saying 'easy peasy lemon squeezy' to the /r/circlejerk^[3] subreddit, where it accumulated upwards of 5,600 points (91% upvoted) over the next year. On November 13th, The Walking Dead aired an episode in which the character Negan says the catchphrase after killing a zombie with a baseball bat.^[2] The following day, YouTuber Socka-2-May uploaded a remix of the scene from The Walking Dead, (shown below).

On April 12th, the @Dory^[8] Twitter feed posted a screenshot of a character from The Magic School Bus "When you thought everything would be "easy peasy lemon squeezy but it's actually difficult difficult lemon difficult" (shown below, left). On April 15th, the Dank Memes Melt Steel Beams Facebook^[7] page uploaded an image macro of a woman biting a laptop with the same caption (shown below, right). Within four days, the post gathered upwards of 26,000 reactions, 11,500 shares and 6,000 comments.

Search Interest

External References