About

Pennywise in the Sewer refers to a series of image macros feature the character Pennywise the Clown luring a child into the sewers from the various film adaptations of Stephen King's 1986 horror novel It.

Origin

The original image of Pennywise in the sewer comes from in a scene from the made-for-TV movie adaptation of Stephen King's horror novel It.^[1] In the film, actor Tim Curry plays Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the corporeal form of a malevolent entity that terrorizes the children of Derry, ME. Pennywise resides mostly in sewers, and in one of the film's most infamous scenes, he lures a child named Georgie down into a storm drain.

Spread

On September 4th, 2010, Funny Junk user Notnamed^[2] posted one of the earliest iterations of the meme as a Demotivational Poster that read "COMMON SENSE Don't trust anyone that lives in the sewers." The image, shown below, received more than 3,300 views.

Following the release of the trailer for the 2017 remake of It, a new crop of Pennywise-related memes emerged. The two-panel image macro includes the shot of Pennywise peering out from the sewer above a screenshot of a video of a woman crawling into a sewer to rescue a kitten (shown below). The screenshot appears to come from the spanish-language website Schanuzi.com, which used a three panel screenshot in their article about the rescue.^[3]

On April 5th, Twitter user @ezeqserra^[4] tweeted (shown below, left) the two images together under the caption "¿Querés papas con cheddar de por vida?" which translates to "Do you want some cheese fries?" The following week, on April 12th, Instagram user @skyferreira^[7] posted the images to Instagram under the caption "come here kid, i have masochism." The post (shown below, right) received more than 15,700 likes.

The images have been featured^[5] on Inverse and TIME.^[6]

On September 13th, Twitter^[8] user @gutsnoglory posted a video of the woman going into the sewer. They captioned the post "Pennywise: I have nothing to offer you I just wanna kill and eat you lol Me:" The post (shown below) received more than 51,000 retweets and 95,000 likes in two days.

Cement Edits

In late April of 2017, variations on the Pennywise Gets You meme began appearing on Instagram and meme-focused subreddits. In the variations, Pennywise invites a person into a sewer for something heinous, leading to two panels which show construction workers filling his hole with cement. One of the earliest and most popular examples was posted by Oblivion_Wonderlust to /r/dankmemes^[9] on April 25th, 2017. It features Pennywise saying "There are infinite genders" (shown below).

Following the post, several other variations appeared on /r/dankmemes with various popular punchlines within the community. The meme also spread to Instagram that day, when meme account champagneemojis^[10] posted a variation about Coachella, gaining over 8,000 likes (shown below, left).

What would Pennywise have to say?

On September 8th, 2017, a feature-length adaptation of It was released in theaters. The film's opening scene re-creates the infamous scene, featuring Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise.

Two days after the release of It, Twitter^[7] user @MotherOfIncest posted a screenshot from the film with the caption "What would Pennywise have to say to get you to go down there with him?" The post (shown below) received more than 3,400 retweets and 17,000 likes.

In response to the tweet, people online began posting humorous answers to the question. On September 13th, Twitter^[9] user @kobychill responded with the answer "'we got vine down here.'" The post (shown below, left) received more than 59,000 retweets and 177,000 likes. Twitter^[10] user @Phil_Lewis_ tweeted (shown below, center) "'I can cancel your remaining student loan balance down here,'" garnering more than 2,200 retweets and 5,600 likes. Twitter^[11] user @narryisart tweeted "I can bring 1d back together," receiving more than 1,400 retweets and 3,200 likes in two days.

That day, rapper Chance the Rapper tweeted^[12] "I got Trix Yogurt." The post (shown below) received more than 28,000 retweets and 146,000 likes in two days.

On September 14th, Twitter^[14] published a Moments page to archive some of the response to the quetion.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References