About

Share If You Don’t Think is an internet catchphrase used as a caption in cropped image macros to express a user or character’s feelings of stupidity or thoughtlessness while encouraging others to repost the image. It is frequently used with smiling characters that are seen as clumsy or foolish.

Origin

The earliest instance of the phrase was on April 20th, 2019 in a tweet by novelty Twitter account @bigbossbigmemes featuring Big Boss from the Metal Gear series (shown below). The tweet gained 7,700 likes and 5,200 retweets in one year.^[1]

Precursors

The images are examples of "Cropped Image Macros," a style of image macro which purposefully removes part of the text from an image macro in order to give the image a new, humorous context. The first popular examples of deliberately altering image macros to take them out of context took the form of Chuck Norris Facts Without Bottom Text. On October 12th, 2017, Twitter user @electrapng tweeted four pictures of Chuck Norris memes with the bottom text cropped out so that only the set-up to old Chuck Norris image macros creating a surreal anti-humor effect. The tweet gained over 27,000 retweets and 71,000 likes. The pictures the user cropped are shown below:

Spread

On May 13th, 2019, Twitter user @reigenbot_ posted an image of Reigen Arataka from the anime Mob Psycho 100 with the caption, receiving over 5,400 likes and 4,200 retweets in one year (shown below, left).^[2] The same day, Tumblr user akodoescrap posted an image with the caption featuring the Touhou Project character Cirno that gained more than 3,000 notes in the same period (shown below, center).^[3] Two days later, on May 15th, Tumblr user kimlip4pres posted an image of the caption with Howl from the anime film Howl's Moving Castle, gaining over 140,000 notes in one year (shown below, left).^[4]

On July 4th, Twitter user @smoothassbrain posted a video of the character Yosuke Hanamura from Persona 4: Dancing All Night with sentence mixing replicating the phrase “share if you don’t think,” gaining over 34,500 views, 2,000 likes, and 600 retweets in eleven months.^[5] YouTuber DaEpicFirestar uploaded @smoothassbrain’s video to YouTube on July 10th, where it gained over 2,300 views in eleven months (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References