About

Mom Can You Give Me Money? refers to an exploitable Rage Comic in which a character asks his mom, a woman with the Female Are You Serious Face, for money. The mom replies "For ice cream?", and the character responds "Yeee-es, ice cream," while secretly plotting to use the money for a different purchase. After appearing in the early 2010s and spreading in the One Direction fandom, the comic was quickly turned into an exploitable in which the boy plots to buy more absurd items, and eventually the comic became a deep fried template with surreal punchlines.

Origin

The template was originally used in the One Direction fandom, and featured the character plotting to buy merchandise for the band. One of the earliest known posts of this edit was reposted to Twitter by user @THENJHQ^[1] on August 8th, 2012 (shown below).

Spread

In the course of the following years, the template was turned into a shitposting exploitable, particularly on Tumblr. On September 9th, 2013, Tumblr user pietriarchy reblogged a post featuring a variation that had the character thinking about bales of hay, gaining over 162,000 notes (shown below, left). Another post showing the boy thinking about The Communist Manifesto reblogged by user Tekrus on May 18th, 2015 gained over 39,000 notes (shown below, right).

The template saw further variations alongside the rise of deep fried memes. One of the most popular early variations posted on the Facebook page Burger Time on July 17th, 2017 featured the deep-fried version of the character asking for money for "burger," then buying heroin Like a Boss (shown below, left).^[3] The post gained 639 likes in a year. A parody version fitting the Cats Wanting Fruit Loops meme was posted on July 20th by Twitter user @aeogard, gaining over 150 retweets (shown below, right).

PewDiePie's Demi Lovato Tweet

Following news that Demi Lovato was hospitalized for a drug overdose in late July of 2018, PewDiePie shared an edit of the heroin variation featuring Lovato as the main character (shown below).

PewDiePie quickly deleted the tweet saying "I didnt mean anything with it and I didnt fully know about the situation. I realize now it was insensitive, sorry!"

Twitter users still expressed their outrage at PewDiePie for sharing the meme. User @jfwong called it "lazy and destructive" (shown below, left) and user @lowkeygivingup tweeted his support for Lovato using the hashtag #PewDiePieIsOverParty (shown below, right). The responses were covered by The Daily Dot.^[2]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References