About

Scumbag Brain is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photo of a brain that is sometimes seen wearing the Scumbag Steve hat, with captions that describe self-conflicting psychological experiences like sudden realizations, awkward dreams and persistent memories. The situations presented are similar to Oh God Why rage comics.

Origin

The earliest known Scumbag Brain image macro was posted to the suicide support r/suicidewatch subreddit in a thread titled "Fucking Scumbag Brain"^[1] by Redditor Jackist on March 24th, 2011, received only 198 upvotes prior to being archived.

Spread

Compilations of the series were posted to the humor blog Pleated Jeans^[8] on July 21st, 2011 and to the viral content site BuzzFeed^[7] on August 9th, 2011. On October 10th, 2011, the web comic site The Oatmeal^[9] published a comic titled "If my brain were an imaginary friend" that featured an annoying brain that is able to remember complex information from several years ago, but cannot remember where it put a set of car keys. A single-topic blog, ScumbagBrain.org^[10] was created in March 2012. The same month a series of instances was featured on PopHangover.^[12]

Additional derivatives can be found on Memebase^[5], Tumblr^[4] and Reddit^[11], where there are more than 3800 instances. A Memegenerator^[3] page has received 280 submissions, the Quickmeme^[2] page has received more than 20,000 submissions and a Facebook^[6] fan page has accumulated 203 likes as of May 2012.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search queries for "scumbag brain" began rising in July of 2011, the same month the Quickmeme page was created.

External References