About

Gary Explaining to SpongeBob refers to a series of memes based on a still image of humanoid Gary holding a book and talking to SpongeBob in a SpongeBob SquarePants episode. The memes are often based on an idea of an unintelligent person being extremely educated in a niche and generally useless area.

Origin

On January 17th, 2000, episode 15a "Sleepy Time" of season one of the SpongeBob SquarePants animated series premiered.^[1] In the episode, SpongeBob enters his pet sea snail Gary's dream, in which Gary has a humanoid body, can speak English, and resides in a huge library. As Gary and SpongeBob converse on the nature of dreaming, he reads a poem by Emily Dickinson (scene shown below).

"Let me not mar that perfect Dream
By an Auroral stain
But so adjust my daily Night
That it will come again."

On October 11th, 2024, X^[2] user @IcyVert posted a still image of humanoid Gary reading from a book to SpongeBob, captioning it with a joke about bad students being experts when it comes to doing easter eggs in Call of Duty: Zombies. The post (shown below) garnered over 15,000 reposts and 228,000 likes in three months.

Spread

Later on October 11th, X^[3] user @benlikessport posted the earliest derivative meme based on the format, a joke about bad students having extensive knowledge about niche NBA players. The post (shown below) gained over 2,100 reposts and 52,000 likes in three months.

On X / Twitter, more users shared memes based on the format in October and November 2024.

On January 22nd, 2025, X^[4] user @geomaniac_ posted a version of the meme about The Binding of Isaac that received over 7,200 reposts and 105,000 likes in two days (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References