About

Greedy Pipe Man refers to a cartoon depicting a large man in a suit guzzling water from a flowing pipe, while a starving, skinny man sitting on the ground drinks water droplets from a leak in the same pipe. The cartoon is used an an exploitable image labeling meme.

Origin

On September 21st, 2010, artist BAYSAL uploaded an original cartoon titled "Injustice" to Flickr^[1] (shown below). The cartoon, drawn in a sepia-tone, shows an angry-looking fat man in a suit lounging in an armchair with his mouth wide open as water flows from a pipe into his mouth. Underneath the pipe is an extremely skinny, naked man looking up at the pipe with his mouth open, drinking droplets of water falling from a leak in the pipe. The cartoon received over 6,100 views in 10 years.

Spread

On November 20th, 2012, Ed Steer published an article to Casey Research^[2] with a re-labeled version of the meme attached to the end, representing the earliest known re-labeled version of the cartoon (shown below, left). On March 31st, 2013, another re-labeled version of the image was posted to Spanish humor site Taringa,^[3] with labels that roughly translate to "government" over the fat man, "village" over the skinny man, and "salary" over the pipe. On November 20th, Know Your Meme user Jarl Balgruuf uploaded a re-labeled version of the image to the League of Legends^[4] entry (shown below, right).

On July 15th, 2017, seth.v.2 uploaded an ironic, deep-fried version of the image to Instagram,^[5] garnering over 20,500 likes in 3 years (shown below, left). He posted another variation on the meme to Instagram^[6] on March 16th, 2018, garnering over 8,500 likes in over 2 years (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

Not available.

External References