About

Scientist Patrick refers to a scene from Spongebob Squarepants in which the character Patrick Star is looking through a sand microscope. It is often used in tandem with an image of Patrick nailing a board to his head to show how competently someone might react to different situations, often with greater and more intense focus being given to less important tasks.

Origin

The original image comes from the episode "Patrick SmartPants" which first aired on October 21st, 2005.^[1] In the episode Patrick loses the top of his head, and is accidentally replaced with an identical piece of brain coral, causing him to become much smarter. He then goes home and begins looking at the SpongeBob character Plankton through a sand microscope (shown below).

In the late 2010's, the image was paired with an image of Patrick Star from the My Pretty Seahorse, which first aired July 12th, 2002.^[2] In the image, Patrick is holding a hammer while wearing a nail and board on his head (shown below)

Spread

The oldest currently known example of the meme was uploaded to /r/bikinibottomtwitter by user u/Lil_boi_patrick on May 14th, 2019 ^[5] comparing their focus on a project in the game Minecraft to that of a school project. (shown below, left). This post gained over 1.5K notes before being archived. The format became more commonly used through that summer. On July 31st, user u/SurvivorNovak^[6] posted such an example that gained over 3,500 points (shown below, right).

Related Memes

Blind Patrick

Blind Patrick is a similar meme using different images of Patrick Star also showing how competently someone might react to different situations. It also arose in the late 2010's. The original image of blind Patrick comes from the episode "Arrgh!" which first aired on March 15th, 2000^[3]. In the episode, Patrick puts on two eye-patches saying "I'm Blind Beard the Pirate" and stumbles around unable to see.(shown below)

This image is often paired with an image from episode "Idiot Box" which first aired March 1st, 2002. In the episode Patrick picks up a pair of water glasses and puts them over his eyes. His eyes viewd through these glasses are replaced with extremely realistic eyes (shown below).

Sometimes Images of Patrick as a scientist are used with blind Patrick as opposed to Patrick nailing a board on his head.

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References