About

Hold Birb Gentle Like Hamburger is a commonly used, purposely grammatically incorrect, expression to caption images of people holding birds or bird-like creatures. Examples of this meme typically parody a Wikihow illustration that is frequently paired with the phrase.

Origin

On October 29th, 2014, Wikihow^[1] bot Wikivisual added an illustration of a human holding a duck to the article "How to Breed Ducks" (shown below).

The earliest available usage of the phrase "Hold birb gentle like hamburger" was posted on September 4th, 2016 by Facebook ^[2] account birdo666, who used the phrase as a caption to the Wikihow illustration. The post received more than 630 reactions and 140 shares in less than four years (shown below).

Spread

Months later, on January 21st, 2017, the image withe corresponding caption appeared on Imgur, ^[3] likely for a post in the /r/me_irl subreddit (shown below, left).

The following month, on February 25th, YouTuber lsah featured the image in a video. The post received more than 7,400 views in a little over three years (shown below, right).

[This video has been removed]

Later that year, others began using the expression for photographs of birds. For example, on September 16th, Facebook^[4] group BirbMemesOfficial shared a variation from the now-defunct Instagram account @birb.reloaded that received more than 8,100 reactions, 1,000 shares and 1,000 comments (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References