I Guess Guy
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About
I Guess Guy refers to a two-panel image taken from an issue of the webcomic series Gunshow by K.C. Green, originally published in November 2010. The panels show a frowning person looking very disgruntled with their arms crossed in the first panel, followed by them throwing their hands in the air and yelling "I GUESS" in the second. The panels are most commonly is used as a reaction image to express begrudging acceptance of something, with the second panel often being used by itself. It is often used to describe situations that the poster finds to be logically sound (and thus unrefutable) but nonetheless displeasing, pointless, or absurd.
Origin
The image was originally two panels of a comic titled "Cat Lunch Break"[1] in which the character in the meme observes a cat sitting on a bench eating a sandwich. The two panels extracted for the meme are the character's reaction after they point the cat out to a companion, who says "It's a cat…taking a lunch break". The characters then continue surveilling the cat and see the cat enter a building labeled "Cat Strip Club." They are then seen visiting the establishment, which is a strip club staffed entirely by housecats.
Spread
Records of early versions of the cropped panels are sparse, but they appear to have been circulating as early as 2012. A comment on FilmFiction.net dated April 16th, 2012[11] links to a colorized version of the meme hosted on PostImage,[12] whose metadata includes a created timestamp of February 26, 2012 at 04:16:15 UTC. The same colorized version shows up in undated FunnyJunk posts from a similar time period, with created timestamps of March and April of the same year,[13][14][15] as well as a black-and-white version with no create date.[16] The earliest date the image was found by TinEye was in the profile photo of YouTube user TheFacerockker on March 2, 2012. Little is known about the meme's spread for the next few years.
On September 13th, 2015, Tumblr user spitblaze used the original black-and-white crop from the comic as a reaction to a textpost from user seriousjones. The textpost, posted on the same day, read simply "your body is a poop gun and eating is just reloading".[2]
This post was screenshotted and reposted as part of a meme dump by Imgur user Kejid on November 28, 2015.[3] When screenshotted the Tumblr post had 20,711 notes, and continued to be reblogged, gaining 109,797 notes by September 2022.
Another Tumblr post made on November 20th, 2015[4] featuring the same reaction image spread even more widely, with 448,000 notes as of September 2022. It was also screenshotted and reposted on Imgur on December 16th, 2015.[5]
The meme in isolation was uploaded to Imgur on December 16th, 2015[6], which was then widely posted as a reaction in Reddit comments. An early example on March 31st, 2016 is a comment linking to the image in response to a post showing an online multiple-choice test where the user selected B, but was marked incorrect, with the correct answer being "D: B and D".[7]
The meme also made its way to Twitter. An early instance found by TinEye[8] was a combination of the image with a Would You Press the Button question, posted on Twitter by the since-suspended meme aggregation account i18plus on December 14th, 2015 (shown below). Other early Twitter appearances include a February 24th, 2016 post by writer Jenna Quigley in response to a now-deleted Kanye West tweet reading "Hi Grammys this is the most important living artist talking".[9]
On July 4th, 2016, Imgur user KappaColors posted a redrawn "HD Version" of the meme,[17] which is largely faithful to the original, but with some small differences, such as notably denser hair in the left panel. This version spawned several derivative redraws and recolorations on Imgur, many of which were nearly as popular as the original HD redraw. The black and white HD version subsequently entered general circulation in place of the original crop, including on Tumblr, prompting comments about the newly high-quality version of the image.[17]
In November 2021, the meme's origins were the subject of Tumblr post which began as a repost of the full comic, and resulted in a Was Anybody Going To Tell Me meme about the "I Guess Guy."[10]
This post (which started as a repost of a TikTok about turning a dancing pole into a scratching post) was in turn widely reblogged and had 120,406 notes in September 2022.
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1] Gunshow – Cat Lunch Break
[2] Tumblr – Your body is a poop gun post by seriousjones
[3] Imgur – Bored at work. Have a random phone dump.
[4] Tumblr – post by user libraryoftheancients
[5] Imgur – screenshot of libraryoftheancients post
[7] Reddit – Well played, medical test
[8] TinEye – Twitter Results
[9] Twitter (archived) – Kanye West
[10] Tumblr – Was anybody going to tell me
[11] FilmFiction.net – Comment on A Total Eclipse of Their Hearts
[12] PostImage – Colorized version
[13] FunnyJunk – Undated comment
[14] FunnyJunk – Colorized version, created March 8, 2012
[15] FunnyJunk – Colorized version, created April 15, 2012
[16] FunnyJunk – Small black and white version, undated, first found by ImageEye December 2013
[17] Tumblr – That's the highest quality version of the I Guess guy I've ever seen; bravo
