Gumbo Slice

About

Gumbo Slice is an AI-generated character depicted as a large Black man eating pizza, most often shown in a swamp or bog setting with alligators and crocodiles while wearing camo shorts and boots. The nickname is a play on the name Kimbo Slice, the famous UFC fighter and professional boxer. Gumbo Slice was originally depicted in the Alligator Kick meme, also known as Black Guy Kicking Alligator. Trending in October 2023, AI art images of Gumbo Slice trended en masse on X / Twitter and Reddit, among other sites, spawning redraws, fan art and other types of memetic content. Most of the Gumbo Slice images were created using Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Bing Image Creator.

Origin

Prior to the creation of Gumbo Slice, the Facebook page Uncle Mike's Photography had generated different images that featured an overweight Black man in a swamp or bog-like setting with pizza earlier in 2023 (examples from Facebook^[1][2] shown below).

On September 30th, 2023, Uncle Mike's Photography posted a series of AI images to Facebook^[3] that included the viral Alligator Kick meme. Many of the other images featured the same fat, Black man in a swamp with pizza and alligators (examples shown below). Over the course of four days, the post received roughly 16,000 reactions.

On October 1st, 2023, the images were reposted to the /r/midjourney^[4] subreddit by Redditor drangis_ who asked, "Is this AI or not? This is the first thing I’ve ever seen where I can’t tell if it’s AI or not and it’s really bugging me, help!" gaining roughly 25,100 upvotes in three days.

The post soon inspired a slew of renditions of the fat, Black man, pizza and alligator combination, resulting in the creation of the nickname "Gumbo Slice" on October 2nd, 2023, when Redditor^[5] MeggirbotOnMJ commented the name on an /r/midjourney^[6] post that asked, "Can we please give this dude a name as well as the alligator he's kicking?" The post gained roughly 1,500 upvotes in two days while MeggirbotOnMJ's comment received over 970 upvotes (shown below). It is the first known utterance of the phrase despite non-viral instances on X^[7][8] posted earlier on October 2nd.

Spread

In early October 2023, various, AI-generated renditions of Gumbo Slice were posted to /r/midjourney, such as one uploaded by Redditor^[9] oldfoundations on October 1st, 2023, which followed the 1970s Dark Fantasy genre, gaining roughly 6,700 upvotes in three days (shown below, left). On October 2nd, Redditor^[10] ImmacowMeow posted an image of the duo getting married, receiving roughly 8,800 upvotes in two days (shown below, right).

Also on October 2nd, 2023, X^[11] user @HimeHinghoi posted a redraw of an original Gumbo Slice image with Hitori Gotoh from Bocchi the Rock! receiving roughly 22,200 likes in two days (shown below, left). The original creator of the meme, Uncle Mike's Photography, also started posting more Gumbo Slice images to Facebook^[12] during the same timeframe (example shown below, right).

AI-generated Gumbo Slice images continued to surface on /r/midjourney^[13][14] going into October 2023. Also, two subreddits, /r/pizzagator^[15] and /r/GumboSlice,^[16] were created in early October 2023.

On October 3rd, the official World of Warcraft X^[17] account notably posted a reference to Gumbo Slice using the in-game race of Pandaren and a crocolisk, receiving over 6,000 likes and 100 replies in 20 hours (seen below).

Alongside the increase in the virality of Gumbo Slice, various sites and media outlets also began covering the memetic character in early October 2023.^[18]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References