About

Sad Laurence Fishburne, also known as Sad Morpheus, is yet another meme related to the now legendary Sad Keanu metameme. The photoshop trend, this time, is using a paparazzi photograph of famous actor Laurence Fishburne, well-known for his Morpheus character in the Matrix trilogy alongside Keanu Reeves as Neo, seated on a public bench while looking at his cell phone with a rather sad or at least serious face.

Origin

On December 27th, 2010, Reddit user kloudera submitted a thread, entitled First Neo, now Morpheus…your move Trinity and featuring a paparazzi photograph of Laurence Fishburne on a public bench :

From the watermark and a December 25 article from the PerezHilton.com website featuring the first image parody, the photograph comes from WENN.

The Reddit thread has gathered more than 270 comments, along with more picture derivatives, reusing the photo as its own photoshop trend.

Spread

Before Reddit, the PerezHilton.com article was already featured on some others websites such as The Daily Belle on December 26, but it was the Reddit thread, so on December 27, that launched its own trend a meme picked up by others websites.

This was first translated by another Reddit thread about it that same day, as well as a mention in a FilmDrunkUproxx.com article and other websites that adopted the Sad Fishburne and Sad Morpheus nicknames. There also was an Ebaum's World thread that same day.

It then appeared on BuzzFeed with an article by user CyberGata, stating the trend has also been picked up by the Daily What that featured an exploitable template, a mention on her website on December 29, a link on Digg and even a thread on Newgrounds.

- Sad Morpheus blog post from Brazilian website 8balls.com on the 1st of January.
- Fark thread on the 1st of January.
- French 10minutesàperdre.fr article from the 3rd of January.
- Meme Generator spin-off as Texting Laurence.

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