About

Sign Bunny is a Twitter meme featuring an ASCII art rabbit holding a sign with customized words and phrases. While it appears to have originated among Brazilian Twitter users, tweets containing the rabbit saw a resurgence among English speakers in September 2014.

Origin

On August 13th, 2013, Twitter user @okumaurso^[1] posted a tweet (shown below, left) featuring an ASCII cat holding a sign containing a rabbit head and the Portuguese word "PROCURA-SE" ("Wanted" in English). On August 22nd, Twitter user @O_Raul^[3] posted a tweet (shown below, right) in which the cat was replaced with a rabbit and the phrase "Cadê o porquinho" ("Where is the pig?" in English).

Spread

On September 16th, 2014, Tumblr employee Amber Gordon posted a tweet^[2] with a sign bunny holding the phrase "Gurl Please" to The Daily Dot editor Cooper Fleishman (shown below).

According to The Daily Dot,^[9] Gordon's followers subsequently began tweeting their own versions of the sign (shown below).

That day, the Twitter feeds for BuzzFeed,^[5] the restaurant chain Denny's,^[6] the news site The Huffington Post^[7] and the pizza restaurant chain Pizza Hut^[8] posted their own sign bunny variations (shown below, clockwise).

According to the Twitter analytics site Topsy,^[4] the ASCII sign bunny was tweeted over 150,000 times in the previous 30 days. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the ASCII rabbit, including Mashable,^[10] Metro^[11] and The Daily Edge.^[12]

Buff Bunny

On April 22nd, 2013, Twitter^[13] user @Regumaru_2525 posted a variation on the sign bunny. The post features an ASCII bunny with humanistic muscles (shown below).

Several years later, the meme was revived. On July 21st, 2018, Twitter^[14] user @javierabegazo tweeted the Buff Bunny next to the Sign Bunny with the phrase "Don't ever talk to me or my son again." The post (shown below, left) received more than 26,000 retweets and 79,000 likes in three days.

On July 23rd, Twitter^[15] user @drunkpupper tweeted the template and replaced the phrase with "i said text me when you get home." The post (shown below, center) received more than 3,900 retweets and 11,000 likes in 24 hours.

That day, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted the Bunny with the phrase "Loving you is not a choice It's who I am." The post (shown below, right) received more than 8,500 retweets and 44,000 likes in 24 hours.

Chuck Schumer Usage

On May 28th, 2019, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer used the Sign Bunny meme to call Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a hypocrite for saying he would fill a Supreme Court seat in 2020 after McConnell infamously blocked a hearing on Barack Obama's nominee Merrick Garland in 2016, claiming the president following Obama should fill the seat as it was Obama's last year as President.^[16]

Twitter users were not amused by Schumer's employment of the meme. User @redsteeze mocked how Schumer had poorly formatted the bunny (shown below, left). User @TheLoveBel0w sarcastically tweeted the tweet was "devastating" and hoped Schumer would have more memes when he was primaried by a more effective challenger (shown below, right).

Search Interest

Not available.

External References