About

Obama's Last Name refers to a misconception held by certain individuals that former United States president Barack Obama's first name is Obama and not Barack. Starting in mid-2019, memes speculating on what Obama's last name could be and imagining it being a well-guarded secret gained significant popularity in meme communities.

Origin

On September 4th, 2012, BuzzFeed published a series of tweets in which Twitter users asked for the last name of then-incumbent United States president Barack Obama, referring to him as Obama, supposedly with the assumption that this was his first name (several tweets shown below).^[1]

Spread

In the following years, the misconception gained more mainstream recognition, with posts making fun of those who wondered what Obama's last name was appearing online. In November 2013, a Facebook post in which a person inquired about Obama's last appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres show (shown below).^[2]

A number of memes dating back to 2013 in which users made fun of those asking about Obama's last name can be discovered online. One of the earliest such memes preserved online was posted by When Ash from Pokemon turns his hat around, you know shits about to go down Facebook page on January 21st, 2013 (shown below, left)^[3]

On June 16th, 2019, Redditor Kaede_Kurosawa posted a Professor X's Mind Rays meme captioned "Me trying to remember Obama's last name like" (shown below).^[4] The post received over 63,700 upvotes in the subreddit in three months and had since been reposted multiple times.

In the following months, memes which speculated on what Obama's last name can be, or imagined Obama's last name being a well-guarded secret gained popularity in both ironic and mainstream meme communities on Reddit and on other websites. In some examples, Obama's last name is imagined to be Care, as in Obamacare.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References