About

Spongebob Filing refers to an exploitable image of Spongebob Squarepants fingering through folders looking for a specific object. In the exploitables, the image is accompanied by a variation on the caption "trying to select X," and each folder is labeled with something related to the joke.

Origin

The image comes from the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Krusty Krab Training Video," which aired on May 10th, 2002.^[1] In the actual scene, Spongebob is looking through folders which contain ingredients for the Krabby Patty, the signature dish of his place of employment, the Krusty Krab. On December 6th, 2016, Twitter parody account @YaBoiSpongebbob^[2] posted a joke about girlfriends looking for something to argue about using the image. The post gained over 9,500 retweets and 14,000 likes (shown below).

Spread

The image began growing slowly over the course of the first half of 2017. On February 1st, 2017, Buzzfeed^[3] included a wholesome edit of @YaBoiSpongebbob's joke in a list of relationship memes (shown below, left). The post is credited to Tumblr user internetromance, but it appears the original post has been deleted. Both the original post and the wholesome circulated through the following few months. It wasn't until the end of May that other variations began appearing online. On May 28th, Twitter user @dorianissad^[4] posted a variation where the folders are labeled with various mental health issues and insecurities (shown below, right). The post gained over 360 retweets and 500 likes. In the following months, this type of post would be the dominant variation, as people on Tumblr and Twitter tended to center the jokes around their various mental health and insecurities.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References