About

The Ass Was Fat is a catchphrase used by a person who notices someone with a butt they consider attractive. The phrase spawned an image macro series, Arthur Sees A Fat Ass, which features the title character of both the book series and children's television show Arthur peeking into a room and staring wide-eyed at what is assumed to be a person with a large or round butt. The text on the image usually shows Arthur describing one of the person's flaws (usually a physical one), but justifying his behavior by saying "but the ass was fat."

Origin

On February 7th, 2012, an anonymous 4chan poster started a thread in which he requested pornographic images of the cartoon characters Arthur Read and Sue Ellen Armstrong from the children's cartoon Arthur. He went on to describe Sue Ellen, and another character from the show named Molly, in a very graphic and sexual manner. Most notably when giving these descriptions, he repeatedly used the phrase "the ass was fat". The following image shows the first post of the thread, along with several replies (click the image to enlarge):

The post was met with disgust and ridicule from posters who believed that his request was legitimate, and laughter from other posters who believed that the thread was made as a joke. The phrase 'the ass was fat' was then repeated by other posters, and an image macro series was created in the same thread. The thread was also archived.

Spread

Several variations of the image macro can be found on Quickmeme.^[1] Also, on February 8th, 2012, several Reddit users began submitting screencaps of the 4chan thread.^[2] One Reddit user by the name 'Zanhana' submitted a link to the screencap on the 'WTF' subreddit,^[3] where it gained 659 upvotes and an overall score of 399. Many of the edits involving the meme use the same image of Arthur describing a person's flaw but adding "the ass was fat" (examples shown below).

The phrase has also been used in non-Arthur related images (examples shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References