About

Oh Brother This Guy STINKS! is a catchphrase from the animated children's show Sponge Bob Square Pants, where Sponge Bob's weak attempts at doing stand-up comedy elicit the heckle. The emphatic delivery of the line led to the audio clip as well as a screengrab of a mostly mute audience being used in memes online.

Origin

The Sponge Bob Square Pants episode "Squirrel Jokes" aired during the show's second season, on September 14th, 2001. The episode opened with Sponge Bob doing a boring comedy set about tomatoes, to which a heckler says "Oh brother, this guy STINKS!" A clip of the scene is shown below, uploaded by YouTuber Pinkerton^[1] on January 4th, 2013. The clip gathered over 3 million views in 11 years.

Spread

Memes featuring the mute audience at Sponge Bob's standup set began making the rounds in the latter part of the 2010s, as seen in a June 10th, 2019 post on /r/BikiniBottomTwitter^[2] (seen below, left). On November 15th, 2022, Redditor Fulltime_Introvert posted a meme using the image to /r/BikiniBottomTwitter, gathering over 27,000 upvotes in two years (seen below, right).

A May 23rd, 2022 post about the phrase on X^[3] by @speedoru gathered over 60,000 likes in two years (seen below, right).

On October 14th, 2022, TikToker^[4] @kylerslegend posted the clip to the video-sharing platform, gathering over 900,000 views and 53,000 likes in two years. The sound subsequently came to be widely used on the app. On January 29th, 2023, TikToker^[6] @lux_mcu posted a fan edit featuring the heckler, gathering over 700,000 plays and 100,000 likes in a year (seen below, left).

On June 17th, 2024, TikToker^[5] @misstyrajanae posted a video using the soundbite to joke about being bored at her graduation, gathering over 500,000 plays and 100,000 likes in two months (seen below, right).

Various Examples

The entire gambling community watching Harrison Barnes put up 0 tonight pic.twitter.com/NOWNrftdw7

— Chuck Goldberg (@chuckgoldberg) January 31, 2023

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References