H (Alphabet)

About

H is the 8th letter of the English alphabet which received attention as an ironic meme in various internet communities in the 2010s.

Origin

One of the earliest examples of "H" being used as the punchline to a joke was in an episode of Chowder called "The Catch Phrase", which aired in 2008. Chef Mung Daal drinks a soda to try and think up a catchphrase but ends up with only the letter H.(shown below)

On August 8th, 2012, YouTuber motdef uploaded a Moonbase Alpha text-to-speech video titled "Moonbase 4lpha: *****y Space Skeletons"(shown below) in which at the 0:55 mark Moonbase Alpha moup posts in the chat "summon h". By late May 2018, the video accumulated more than 800,000 views.

Spread

In February 2014, a page called "H memes" was created on Facebook.^[1] The first post was an image of the trollface with a red "h" on top of it.(shown below)

On August 8, 2017 redditor /u/fuckutrevor posted a Facebook screencap on /r/OldPeopleFacebook featuring a facebook user named Brenda accusing Donald Trump, and discount store retail chain Target, and the Illuminati of all being connected, to which Target responds "We're sorry you feel this way, Brenda" and Brenda responds with a lone "h".^[2](shown below) This post has been incorrectly been cited as the origin of the meme.^[3]

Then on January 14, 2018 Twitter user @crysteI posted a tweet with 2 images of Gordon Ramsay with the letter H with the caption "my sense of humor now". This tweet to date has 15,000 retweets and 44,000 likes.(shown below)

The virality of this tweet prompted Jason Koebler of Motherboard to write an article looking into the history of the "h" meme.^[4]

More recently, H has appeared on Tumblr. An "H thread" originally started by blogger the-great-mighty-dick on March 30th, 2018 gained over 13,000 notes in two months.^[5]

Search Interest

External References