Oh That's Real Nice / SpongeBob Fish Looking Into Toilet

About

Oh That's Real Nice, also known as SpongeBob Fish Looking Into Toilet or Martin Looking Into A Toilet, refers to an exploitable meme template taken from an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants in which the fish character Martin looks into a toilet and sees SpongeBob's hyper-realistic body floating in the water. Martin's quote "Oh, that's real nice," was later used as the caption for the screencap and thus became a reaction image. Then, meme creators recaptioned the meme, replacing the words "real nice" with other objects, people or concepts imagined to be in the toilet and found by Martin. The most common phrases inserted into the phrasal template related to shock media not intended to be seen. The template trended across Reddit, iFunny and Instagram, among other platforms, predominantly in the early 2020s.

Origin

On October 5th, 2001, Season 3, Episode 43b of SpongeBob SquarePants titled "The Bully" aired on American television.^[1] In one scene, SpongeBob hides inside a bathroom toilet bowl as another character named Martin opens the toilet bowl lid and sees an actual sponge, to which he says, "Oh, that's real nice" (YouTube ^[2] uploaded shown below).

On October 14th, 2015, the Tumblr^[3] blog reactionfaces posted the sceencap of Martin looking into the toilet, gaining roughly 1,800 notes in seven years (shown below, left). On January 1st, 2017, a template with the scene was uploaded to the ShitpostBot 5000 website.^[4] On March 17th, 2021, the Twitter^[5] account of ShitpostBot5000 posted a meme using the template, gaining over 290 likes in six years (shown below, right).

Spread

The meme gained traction in 2019. For instance, on July 27th, 2019, Redditor the_prion posted a meme to /r/BikiniBottomTwitter^[6] that used the template and labeled /r/PoliticalHumor as being in a toilet, gaining over 35 upvotes in three years (shown below, left). On October 11th, 2019, a since-deleted Redditor posted a meme to /r/BikiniBottomTwitter^[7] that gained over 230 upvotes in three years (shown below, right).

Sometime in late 2020, a currently unknwon meme creator used Impact font to add a top and bottom caption to the image reading, "Oh that's real nice" (shown below, left). Currently, the earliest known posting of the image was uploaded on December 6th, 2020, by iFunnyer^[8] gladly. Roughly a month prior to the aforementioned repost, on November 17th, 2020, iFunnyer^[9] GigaBrain exploited a moldy version of the image to make a joke about a severed head in an Applebee's toilet akin to the Murder Coordinates trend. The meme received over 90 smiles in two years (shown below, right). On November 24th, 2020, the Tumblr^[10] blog petits-pois-carotide shared the image, gaining over 31,000 notes in 10 months (since deleted).

More iterations soon followed that exploited the same Impact font meme. For instance, on December 21st, 2020, iFunnyer^[11] CartoonHeisenburg posted an iteration that read, "Oh, that's a pipe bomb," and gained roughly 38,200 smiles in two years (shown below, left). The trend continued into 2022, becoming entrenched in other meme formats. For instance, on January 8th, 2022, the Tumblr^[12] blog quincunx posted a QRPosting meme that linked to a not secure Five Nights At Freddy's link (shown below, right). The image has since been deleted but was reposted to Funnyjunk ^[13] and Twitter^[14] soon after.

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References