He Leaned Back Too Far and Rippen Through That Canvas Ceiling

About

He Leaned Back Too Far and Rippen Through That Canvas Ceiling refers to a viral copypasta and associated cursed image of a man standing up in an active Gravitron machine, seemingly unphased by the spinning. In 2018, the image became associated with a story about someone else who stood up in a Gravitron, leaned too far back, and ripped (misspelled "rippen" in the original post) through the canvas ceiling, traveling a block before landing. The story became a copypasta that year, and the image an exploitable.

Origin

On March 16th, 2018, an anonymous user of 4chan's /x/^[1] (Paranormal) board posted an image of a man standing up in a Gravitron machine with the post-text "cursed image." Three minutes later, an anonymous user commented with a story about how someone at their local town fair stood up in the Gravitron once, leaned too far back, and ripped through the ceiling, traveling a block before landing in someone's yard. Allegedly, the Gravitron machine is still used, the hole duct-taped over (shown below).

one motherfucker did this at the fair in town. He leaned back too far and rippen through that canvas ceiling above him. I guess it fling him about a block away before he landed in somebody's yard.

They still use the same machine, but there's a huge duct tapped patch over one of those triangles in the ceiling.

Spread

Over the next month, anonymous /x/^[2][3] users began commenting the story as an exploitable copypasta in random threads, often in response to cursed images, changing aspects of it to fit the context of the conversation and image (examples shown below). The copypasta has remained a meme on the board since, used as both an exploitable, and in its original form, most often in response to the Gravitron image.

On November 1st, 2018, an anonymous /x/^[8] user made a post titled, "Scary things that have happened at fairs or carnivals" in which they post the copypasta with the image, resulting in photoshops and references to it throughout the post (example shown below).

The copypasta and image spread outside of 4chan (and to other 4chan boards) over the course of the next year. For example, on December 16th, 2018, Redditor u/WigsPushedBack posted the image to /r/hmmm.^[4] That same day, u/b00z3r commented the copypasta.

The image became a popular subject of photoshops in 4chan^[6][7] posts often associated with the copypasta in both its exploited and original form (examples shown below, left and right).

On October 25th, 2019, Twitter^[5] user @catsoup quote-tweeted the copypasta in response to a photoshop of the Gravitron image replacing the standing man with singer Fred Durst (shown below).

The copypasta has persisted on /x/ and 4chan in general as of March 19th, 2021, with a yuki.la^[9] search for "rippen through" resulting in over 80 pages of results as of said date.

Various Examples

Search Interest

[Unavailable]

External References