About

Le Monke is a photoshopped photograph of an obese orangutan with a confused face that became popular source material for shitposting on various imageboards, forums and other online communities in 2016. In 2019, a Le Monke video based on the "Uh Oh Stinky Poop" copypasta saw a surge in popularity.

Origin

The earliest known use of the image with the words "le monke" can be found in a thread started by an anonymous user on 4chan's [s4s] board on January 21st, 2016 (shown below, left).^[5]

The ape depicted in the photograph has been identified as an orangutan which resided at the Surabaya Zoo in Indonesia in 2009. The unedited version of the photograph, taken by Flickr user em de a, is shown below, right.^[1]

Spread

On February 9th, 2016, an anonymous 4chan^[18] user uploaded the sound of someone saying the line. However, the file has since been deleted and could not be confirmed.

The following month, on March 3rd, 2016, YouTuber lemonke uploaded a video titled "le monke" featuring the still image of Jackie set to "Requiem for a Dream" as the background music. In the following three months, the video has garnered 35,000 views, 1,260 likes and 600 comments.

On May 26th, 2016, a Facebook page^[2] was launched as a hubsite for shitposts featuring images of le monke. The page has garnered more than 11,000 likes In less than two weeks. On May 28th, Redditor Theniallmc created a subreddit community dedicated to the curation of le monke memes at /r/lemonke.^[6] On June 2nd, the Facebook page posted an image^[4] featuring close-up images of four bearded mouths, including one cropped from the image of le monke, which gained more than 1,100 likes in less than 48 hours (shown below).

That same day, The Daily Dot published an article featuring several le monke images from the Facebook page.^[3][7][8]

Uh Oh Stinky Poop and 2019 Resurgence

On October 29th, 2015, an anonymous 4chan user made a lengthy humorous post about defecation in /b/ board.^[10] In the following months, the copypasta has been posted in multiple threads on /b/ and other 4chan boards.^[11][12]

On March 15th, 2016, YouTube user Real Human Bean posted a video of Le Monke in which they narrated the copypasta.^[13] The video gained over 364,200 views in three years.

Starting in late May 2019, the video saw an increase in use in ironic meme communities on Instagram, iFunny and Reddit, with notable posts by YouTube user obliviousmothperson,^[14] Instagram user thi.ccmemes^[15] and iFunny user IamNoble (examples shown below).^[16]

Uh Oh Stinky TikTok Videos

On January 22nd, 2019, YouTuber Jab50Yen posted a mix of "Uh Oh Stinky" Real Human Bean's narration and Lavender Town theme song from Pokemon Red/Blue titled "Uh Oh Town." The video gained over 278,000 views in nine months (shown below).^[17]

On September 10th, 2019, TikTok user @c0ckandballcouture uploaded the remix to the platform (shown below). The video gained over 2,400 likes and 250 shares in a month. The audio, titled "Thee Tonthicc used my audio," has been used in over 135,000 TikTok videos in one month.

On September 28th, TikTok user @gabriela.bee uploaded a video using the audio in which she attempts to hide from Le Monke (shown below, left). The video accumulated over 806,700 likes and 36,000 shares in two weeks. That same day, TikTok user @jeyjeygardi uploaded a le monke video using the audio which garnered over 537,300 likes and 7,400 shares in two weeks. The next day, @yellowasia uploaded a TikTok video linking the audio with Harambe which received over 412,000 likes and 19,200 shares in two weeks (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References