About

How Little Kids Cough refers to a series of real and doctored images of animals, people and objects that resemble a child coughing without covering their mouths. The meme began on Twitter following the spread of the Coughing Cat image.

Origin

On December 3rd, 2018, Twitter^[1] user @40ozAliah tweeted the image of the Coughing Cat with the caption, "this is how lil kids cough." The post received more than 598,000 likes and 200,000 retweets in less than two years (shown below).

Spread

Over the next two years, people began posting similar images of animals coughing and comparing them to children. For example, on January 12th, 2020, Twitter^[2] user @_Kinglrg shared an image of Baby Yoda coughing with the caption "Little kids tryna make sure you see them coughing." The tweet received more than 146,000 likes and 37,000 retweets in less than one year (shown below, left).

Other variations of the Coughing Cat also grew in popularity. On April 26th, 2020, Twitter^[3] user @JuiceKing5x tweeted an image of another cat wit the same face. The post received more than 107,000 likes and 34,000 retweets in less than six months (shown below, center).

That year, Redditor^[4] FeistyLighterFluid posted an image of the Pokémon Marikarp in the film Detective Pikachu with a joke about the coronavirus safety protocols. The post received more than 120,000 points (94% upvoted) and 925 comments in less than 24 hours (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References