About

Obama Vacationing refers to jokes made about photographs of former President Barack Obama kitesurfing with Virgin CEO Richard Branson two weeks after his term as president ended.

Precursor

About a week before Obama was seen kitesurfing with Richard Branson, Obama was seen vacationing wearing a backwards baseball cap, which sparked enough jokes for a Twitter Moment.^[2]

Origin

On February 7th, 2017, Virgin^[1] posted an article written by their CEO Richard Branson detailing his and former president Barack Obama's trip to the British Virgin Islands. They engaged in a friendly competition to see if Barack Obama could learn how to kitesurf before Branson could learn how to foilboard. They posted a video of the day, as well as pictures of the two of them in the water.

Spread

After the pictures were posted, Twitter users immediately began remarking upon how happy Obama looked after a tough presidency and making jokes about the photos. A popular type of joke was to compare the Obama pictures to a picture one might post after a breakup to show how well he/she was doing. One of the most popular of these jokes, with over 23,000 retweets and 69,000 likes, was posted by @luckyturner^[3] (shown below).

Others lampooned the Biden/Obama friendship that had provided memes during their administration and made jokes about how much they missed Obama under the presidency of Donald Trump. The popularity of the jokes made Twitter Moments^[4] that day and was covered by The Daily Dot on the 8th.^[5]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References