Monkey Puppet

About

Monkey Puppet, also known as the Awkward Look Monkey, refers to a reaction image and GIF of a puppet appearing surprised. It's used to express shock, particularly in situations where one party owns another in a verbal exchange.

Origin

The puppet comes from a Japanese children's television show called Ōkiku naru Ko (Growing Children) which first aired April 7th 1959 and ran until March 18th, 1988.^[1] It also ran in Latin America. The main character, Kento ("Pedro" in Spanish), is the monkey used in reaction images and GIFs. The character began being used in Spanish-language-speaking parts of the internet under the name No Ahora Porfavor ("not now, please").

Spread

On March 31st, 2016, YouTube user TobiSilvero uploaded the clip from which the meme spread to the site. The video has since been deleted (shown below the currently available version).

On April 8th, 2016, Spanish site t13.cl^[2] covered the meme. On June 23rd, 2016, a GIF of the moment was posted to Giphy (shown below).^[3]

The meme started gaining attention from English internet sites in the summer of 2016. On July 1st, 2016, Twitter user @ultkjongin^[4] uploaded the GIF in response to a story about Staples making fun of a necklace made by Kris Jenner (shown below). This was covered in The Daily Mail's roundup of reactions to the story.^[5] On November 2nd, 2016, a version of the character was posted to /r/MemeEconomy,^[6] gaining 120 upvotes (shown below, right).

Some other popular posts to use the character include a Tumblr post from user toggenburg^[7] which stated the word gullible looks the same upside down that gained over 47,000 notes (shown below, left). Twitter user @DimitriaKimill posted a joke about Game of Thrones using the image, gaining over 340 retweets (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References