About

Know-It-All is the colloquial name of the character Ian from the 2004 animated film The Polar Express. In late 2018, the character was used as a reaction image making fun of people with nerdy opinions.

Origin

"Know-It-All" was a character in 2004's Polar Express. He was characterized by his spouting of annoying facts and irritating the other passengers.

The earliest known usage of the character as an image macro was posted by Twitter ^[2] user @mister_faceless on December 17th, 2018. They captioned the post with a joke about TikTok. The post received more than 1,400 retweets and 5,900 likes in four days (shown below).

Spread

The following day, on December 18th, 2018, Twitter user @SanicGTGF^[1] posted the image with the caption "You guys wanna hear sicko mode or mo bamba," making the character sound like a nerdy white hip-hop fan. The tweet gained over 109,000 retweets and 430,000 likes (shown below).

Over the following several days, more posts featuring the character appeared, often characterizing him as having a nerdy opinion. For example, a December 19th post in the subredddit /r/brockhampton using the character gained over 680 points. A post in /r/nba making fun of critics of James Harden gained over 420 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References