About

‌Lin-Manuel Miranda on TV Reading Off A Smartphone is an image macro series featuring a photograph of a person holding a smartphone up to a TV that is playing a moment in the 2020 Disney+ performance film of the musical Hamilton when star Lin-Manuel Miranda has his head turned down and his eyes are squinting. The effect of the image is that Miranda appears to be reading off the phone.

Origin

On July 3rd, 2020, Hamilton debuted on Disney+ (trailer below).^[1]

On January 1st, 2021, Twitter ^[2] user @rockwellism tweeted the earliest known example of the meme. They captioned the post, "been laughing at this for 10 mins straight." The post received more than 1.2 million likes and 158,000 retweets in less than one month (shown below).

Spread

The following day, on January 2nd, 2020, Redditor Parker1055 shared the image in the /r/memes^[3] subreddit with the caption "When you find a funny meme but no one around to show it to." The post received more than 46,000 points (97% upvoted) and 270 comments in less than one month (shown below, left).

Days later, on January 5th, Redditor Mutagrawl posted the meme in the /r/MemeEconomy^[4] subreddit. The post received more than 10,000 points (95% upvoted) and 140 comments in less than one month.

Over the next month, people continued to share the image, particularly in conjunction with an adjacent image to joke about what Miranda is looking at (example below, right).

Various Examples

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Search Interest

Not available.

External References