About

Ima Keep It Real With U Chief refers to an image macro of Kermit the Frog appearing to console fellow Muppet Pepe the King Prawn with the text "Ima Keep It Real With You Chief!!" followed by an uncomfortable truth. The image spread primarily in deep fried with different captions.

Origin

The earliest known post of the meme appeared on the Facebook page Space Friends on January 14th, 2016 (shown below).^[1] However, the watermark on the image suggests it was created by Instagram user icyunvme_echols, which is locked, meaning it was likely created sometime before then.

Spread

The picture started seeing use in deep fried memes over a year later. Twitter user @bigguccialec^[2] posted a deep fried variation of the image on May 8th, 2017 (shown below, left). Another Twitter-specific variation was posted by user @palacepjm on December 28th, 2017 (shown below, right).

The template reached the height of its popularity in the spring of 2018, as the variations began getting more surreal. For example, a post circulating on Tumblr grew popular with a variation in which Kermit says, "I have a gun in my ass," gaining over 36,000 notes there.^[3] A screenshot of the post to /r/Tumblr gained over 390 points (shown below, left). On May 18th, 2018, an Imgur post referencing the Yanny or Laurel debate gained 29 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References