That's On Me, I Set the Bar Too Low

About

"That's On Me, I Set the Bar Too Low" is a quote from a 2016 crossover episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and New Girl. It has been used as a meme template to illustrate that a certain category of entities has a couple of very obvious or similarly-named members, and thus makes a poor benchmark to test a person's knowledge in the field.

It can be deconstructed like this:

I know a lot about X.
Then name a number of things about X.
(names the most obvious things)
That's on me, I set the bar too low.

Origin

The original scene comes from a crossover episode between the two sitcoms Brooklyn Nine-Nine and New Girl that aired on October 11th, 2016. In the episode, detective Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) is in pursuit of a jewelry thief and stops a civilian car to commandeer it in his chase. The driver, Jess Day (Zooey Deschanel), is reluctant to let him do so and doubts that he's is even a police officer. Jess asks him to prove it by naming any law, and Jake does so by pointing out that killing people is illegal, whereupon Jess admits that the question was too easy.

Jake: "I'm not a thug, I'm police."
Jess: "Okay, then name one law."
Jake: "Don't kill people?"
Jess: (silently) "That's on me, I set the bar too low."

Spread

The earliest usage of the format was posted to r/MemeTemplatesOfficial on August 17th, 2019 (below, left), but only gained 20 points in six months^[1] and didn't gain much popularity (shown below, left). The most popular version from this period was posted to r/Animemes on September 4, 2019 (below, right), where it gained 15,500 points in six months.^[2]

The meme only truly took off nearly two years later, in late may 2021, after a version about Sam Raimi was posted to r/memes^[3] on May 26, 2021, gaining 115,000 points in five days.

Various Examples

Search interest

External References