About

Safety Instruction Parodies, also known as Airline Safety Memes, are various illustrations and diagrams typically seen in safety instruction manuals accompanied by humorous captions that are generally subversive in nature.

Origin

The website Airtoons^[1] was launched on February 21st, 1999, featuring illustrations from aircraft safety cards accompanied by humorous captions (shown below). According to the site description, the creator came up with the idea for the parodies after viewing a flight card that did not have any captions while traveling on an airline.

Spread

Fight Club Promotion

On October 15th, 1999, the black comedy film Fight Club^[6] was released, in which the protagonist placed parody flight cards in commercial aircraft. For promotion of the film, Fox Movies^[7] released images of the flight cards for download off their official website (shown below).

Homeland Security Advisory System

On March 22nd, 2002, the Bush administration unveiled the Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS), a color-coded alert mechanism that would reflect the degree of terrorism threat within the U.S. territories at any given moment. Due to its ambiguous criteria, the HSAS initiative was widely panned by critics and pundits alike, eventually spawning a slew of parodies using a color-coded scale.

FEMA Ready Campaign

In February of 2003, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) launched Ready.gov^[3] as part of a public service advertising campaign to provide information on how to prepare for national emergencies. The site provided various illustrations that were considered ambiguous by many viewers, prompting the creation of the parody site SafeNow.org,^[4] which featured humorous captions alongside original illustrations from the Ready.gov website (shown below). Airtoons subsequently added different parodies of the Ready.gov images under the heading "Additional Government Safety Measures."

On April 24th, the Titled Forum Project^[2] philosophy board member Gatecrashed posted a thread titled "Parodies of Airplane Safety Brochures," which reblogged many notable examples from the Airtoons website. On December 27th, 2010, the pop culture blog Unreality Mag^[5] highlighted many of the Airtoons images in a post titled "Funny in Flight Safety Cards a La Fight Club."

Gym Workout Diagrams

On September 10th, 2010, the Internet humor site College Humor^[8] published a post titled "Realistic Gym Workout Diagrams," which featured parody workout posters for exercising specific muscle groups (shown below).

Try Not to Cry / Cry a Lot

In early 2013 edits of a particular image from the College Humor article began to circulate online. The post usually shows an emotional image or piece of text followed by the "Lie Down; Try Not to Cry; Cry a Lot" image beneath it.

2018 Revival

On October 9th, 2018, Redditor ^[9] SanpDraggen posted one of the first of several Safety instructions Parodies in the /r/me_irl subreddit. The image features a person attempting to escape an airplane mid-flight with the caption " Me when someone says my airplane safety memes will never take off." The post received more than 33,000 points (94% upvoted) and 170 comments in 24 hours.

That day, the image was shared on the /r/dankmemes ^[10] subreddit, where it earned another 4,900 points (94% upvoted) and 40 comments in 24 hours. Following the posts, memes of the /r/dankmemes and /r/me_irl subreddits began using the format of recontextualized Safety Instructions for various memes (examples below).

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Not available.

External References