About

"I Haven’t Heard That Name In Years" is an expression commonly paired with various images of washed-up looking subjects smoking cigarettes to portray them as if they're trying to recollect memories of the past.

Origin

Prior to the internet, the image of a downtrodden figure sucking on a cigarette was popularized by noir films.^[3] One of the more popular examples of the "I haven't heard that name in a long time" cliché comes from Star Wars, when Obi-wan Kenobi is asked about his true name by Luke Skywalker.

One of the earliest examples of "Haven't heard that name in years" as a joke format is a tweet by @DoctorJeph,^[4] who used it in a tweet making a Thomas the Tank Engine joke. The tweet, shown below, has over 27,000 retweets and 42,000 likes as of August 19th, 2016.

Predecessor

Crabs smoking cigarettes were the first collective instances of cigarettes in the possession of animals to be viral.

Spread

The meme began spreading around Twitter,^[2] where the joke is most popular, after user @pooplissa^[5] uploaded a picture of a smoking rat with the caption "Ratatouille? Haven't heard that name in years." The tweet, shown below, has over 50,000 retweets and 70,000 likes. The joke was posted without credit to /r/funny^[6] where it gained 4,905 points, 80% upvotes.

Twitter users continued to tweet variations on the joke throughout the summer of 2016, and in August 2016, both Paper Mag^[1] and The Daily Dot^[3] published articles investigating the gag accompanied by compilations of some notable variations.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References