About

Futurama Fry is an image macro series that uses a still of Fry squinting his eyes from the TV show Futurama, and is typically paired with overlaid text using a phrasal template. The top line reads "Not sure if X", with "or just Y" as the bottom line, and is used to represent an internal monologue.

Origin

In the Season 2, Episode 6 episode of Futurama titled "The Lesser of Two Evils", Fry can be seen making the face shortly after being found searching Leela's underwear drawer at around 15 minutes into the episode.^[1]

This still image was first used in a I See What You Did There derivative:

Spread

One of the earliest derivatives to use the phrasal template appears to be the "not sure if trolling, or just stupid" image macro. Derivatives can be found on Memebase^[2], Quickmeme^[3], FunnyJunk^[4], Memegenerator^[5], and the Advice Animals subreddit.^[6]

Notable Derivatives

Template

Canonical Recognition

The 7th season of the show aired on June 20th, 2012.^[7] In the weeks leading up to the start of the new season, Comedy Central aired several commercials featuring Fry using the style and phrasal template of "Not Sure if X". Amongst original ones, these also used featured various popular versions of the phrase found online. On June 20th, 2012, Fry appeared at the end of the opening sequence of the new episode in the style of the phrasal template along with the caption "Not sure if new episode, or just rerun of episode I watched drunk".

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[This video has been removed]

Search Interest

Search query volume for "futurama fry" is far too large to be limited to the image macro series, but "fry meme" and "futurama meme" may provide a more accurate look at search query volume specifically related to the images. Searches of the phrase commonly associated with the Fry meme, "Not sure if trolling, or just stupid" can also be seen as increasing months after the introduction of the meme.

External References