About

Happy Chair or Smiling Chair refers to an exploitable picture of lawn chairs on a balcony with snow on them forming a smiley face while in the background a massive fire is burning on a hill. The meme's template typically resurfaces whenever a tragedy or some sort of world event takes place, making it a commonly used example of object labeling and image macros due to the juxtaposition of the smiling expression and the wildfire raging in the background, similar to the This Is Fine meme.

Origin

On January 7th, 2017, in the subreddit r/photoshopbattles, the redditor Marmite-Badged uploaded a photograph^[1] of stacked chairs covered in snow, with holes reminiscing of a smiling face (below on the left). It was the subject of several edits, as is usual for all pictures posted in this subreddit. On January 9th, Supreme_doge_was_ere posted an Imgur link to their own edit^[2], with a background of burning hills (below on the right). This comment received 892 upvotes, many of them given after a repost in r/pics^[3] on February 16th gained more than 17000 upvotes in a mere day before being blocked.

Spread

Over the following years, the image of the smiling chair continued to be used in memes as it spread to other sites and platforms. For instance, on February 20th, 2017, a version with text inspred from the line Some Men Just Want To Watch The World Burn was uploaded on Dump a Day^[4]; and two years later, on November 26th, 2019, another was posted on Tumblr^[5], this time using the This Is Fine meme as the punchline (shown below).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Happy Chair template saw another resurgence as an object labeling meme; for instance, it was posted to /r/Dankmemes on April 7th, 2020^[6], by Redditor anotherformerlurker, where it gained 3,000 upvotes in two years (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References