About

The Lemon of Troy is a photoshop meme that places the sour face of the Simpsons character Shelby's Father after eating a lemon on the heads of other characters. The meme is popular on the Facebook account Simpsons Shitposting.

Origin

On May 14th, 1995, the Fox television network aired the 24th episode of season 6 of The Simpsons, "Lemon of Troy."^[2] In the episode, the children of Springfield discover their beloved lemon tree was stolen from them by the children of the rival town of Shelbyville. When the family patriarch Homer Simpson demands the tree's return, the character of Shelby's father^[3] mocks him and takes a bite of a lemon. His eyes begin to tear and his mouth curls in wards, expressing the sourness of the fruit (video below).

Spread

Starting in January 2016, the Facebook^[4] account Simpsons Shitposting began posting several photoshops in which Shelby's father's face would be superimposed on another character's body or an inanimate object. One of the earliest, Facebook user Philip Le Vitsky‎ posted a picture of a lemon with Shelby's father's face superimposed on top of it (shown below, left) on January 25th, 2016.

Over the next few months, users continued to photoshop Shelby's father's face onto different characters (examples, center and right).

On April 1st 2016, Redditor ^[1] SadOnion52 a photoshopped image from the Simpsons episode "Bart on the Road," in which Bart, Milhouse, Nelson and Martin are in a car. Underneath the original image, the four can be seen with Shelby's father's sour face superimposed over their own. Prior to archival, the post (shown below) recieved more 1900 upvotes.^[1]

Various Examples

External References