About

"I Like The Part Where…" (also "I Like the Part When") is a snowclone expression used in YouTube comments to make an obvious statement about the video, for instance, “I like the part where he played Call of Duty” on a Call of Duty Let's Play video.

Origin

One of the earliest uses of this type of facetious commentary appeared in the March 11th, 1993 episode of The Simpsons titled “Last Exit to Springfield.”^[1] In the episode, Bart utters “the best part was when the buildings fell down” (shown below) while watching a television segment titled “When Buildings Collapse.”

These types of comments became popular on multiple 4chan boards in early 2008, specifically on /a/ (Anime and Manga). One of the first instances was posted on February 8th, 2008^[4] in a discussion about Masako Nozawa, the voice actress who played Son Goku in the original Japanese Dragon Ball series.

Spread

On May 1st, 2009 a similar comment was posted on the blog Business Pundit.^[2] After the blogger posted a photo of a broken retail sign that said "0% Off Select Items Today," the first commenter known as Steve replied with "I liked the part where a number fell off and it looked like the sign said '0% off'." The other commenters either applauded Steve's humor or called him out for trolling.

By July 2010, there were more than 29,000 results for "I like the part where…" on YouTube, with another 17,000 for "I like the part when…". At the same time, these comments were occurring multiple times per hour (shown below). In December 2010, the first definition for "I Like The Part…" was added to Urban Dictionary^[3], covering both "where" and "when" instances appearing in YouTube comments.

In April 2011, a thread titled Predictable YouTube Comments was posted on the Steam forum^[8], in which many people complained about the comments used to state the obvious. By 2012, these types of comments began to appear on news sites including Kotaku.^[9] As of October 2013, the phrase has since been used hundreds of times on 4chan^[5] and Reddit^[7] and millions of times on YouTube^[6] in comments, titles and descriptions.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References

^[1] Wikipedia – Last Exit to Springfield

^[2] Business Pundit – When You See This, Retail has Recovered

^[3] Urban Dictionary – I Like The Part…

^[4] Foolz Archive – This woman was the voice of Goku

^[5] Foolz Archive – Search Results for "i like the part"

^[6] Google – Search Results for "i like the part" on YouTube

^[7] Reddit – Search Results for "i like the part"

^[8] Steam Forums – Predictable Youtube Comments

^[9] Kotaku – Comment Thread: I like the part where you blogged about videogames.