About

Skeptical Baby is an advice animal image macro series featuring a baby with a cocked eyebrow. The captions usually begin with the rhetorical setup "You mean to tell me…" out of disbelief and describe various realizations about life that one acquires upon entering preadolescence, including basic social responsibilities and "white lies" that are told by parents.

Origin

The original photo was taken by North Carolina family photographer and Redditor Jarod Knoten^[1][5] and published to his blog^[2] on November 15th, 2011. It was part of a family album set for Dave, whose Redditor handle is dcthomas82^[4], his wife Rhiannon and their son Mason at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Dave submitted the picture of his son via Reddit^[3] on January 11th, 2012, where it landed on (or just "hit") the front page with 1133 upvotes. The first instance of the image macro was posted on the same day in the comments section with a "Most Interesting Man in the World" type caption. Later that day, a second thread^[12] was started in the Advice Animals subreddit deeming the photo “Skeptical Baby,” pairing it with a caption of disbelief. It received 6513 upvotes and a score of 991.

Spread

Within eight days of creation, the Quickmeme^[6] page accumulated 1146 upcoming instances, over 60 instances of which have been posted to the Advice Animals subreddit.^[13] On January 14th, a series of Skeptical Baby images were posted to humor Tumblr blog TopTumbles^[9] where it received nearly 39,000 notes within 4 days. Later, more of these images were shared on several humor sites and blogs including FunnyJunk^[7], ThumbPress^[8], Tastefully Offensive^[10], and BuzzLOL.^[11]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References