Happy Chair

About

Happy Chair or Smiling Chair refers to an exploitable picture of a lawn chair on a balcony with snow on it 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 February 20th, 2017, the website DumpADay^[1] uploaded a picture compilation of funny meme images, with Happy Chair being one of those featured. This original chair meme featured the text on it about wanting to watch the world burn is the earliest known post of the image and meme online (shown below).

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. Two years later, on November 26th, 2019, the Happy Chair template was used again on Tumblr^[2], this time using the This Is Fine template as the main punchline (shown below).

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

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References