About

"The Narwhal Bacons at Midnight" is a catchphrase that was created for Redditors to identify themselves in public places. It is used in fanart, rage comics, and is often referenced as an inside joke in Reddit threads.

Origin

Redditor Saydrah posted a thread on the AskReddit^[1] subreddit titled "Hey Reddit, I'm Redditing from the Denver International Airport and I see a lot of people on laptops around using the free wifi. Just on the offchance, any fellow Redditors here?" on August 7th, 2009.

In the thread description field, Saydrah described her attempts at finding Redditors at the Denver International Airport. Redditor FreakinWolfy replied, saying, "'The narwhal bacons at midnight' is now the official phrase to identify yourself as a redditor." It received 661 points, making it the top-voted comment in the thread.

Spread

A Reddit^[9] post titled "The narwhal bacons at midnight" linking to FreakinWolfy's comment was posted the same day, and received 233 upvotes. An image of a narwhal sculpture made out of bacon and chicken was posted to Reddit^[2] on August 28th, 2009. A video of Redditor Karmanaut cooking a bacon narwhal was uploaded to YouTube on September 29th, 2009:

A rage comic was posted to the r/f7u12 subreddit^[10] expressing a Redditor's frustration with not knowing the meaning of the joke on July 3rd, 2011, and received 1,092 up votes. On July 5th the phrase popped up in a forum thread on Bungie^[11], and on the MMO Champion^[12] forums on July 10th.

Narwhals on the Internet

On August 15th, 2007, a narwhal-inspired Cyanide and Happiness comic was posted to the website Explosm.^[3] A thread titled "F--KIN' NARWHALS! F--K YEAH!" was posted to the /r/pics^[4] subreddit on November 1st, 2008. The post featured a screenshot of a thread on the IGN forums^[5] from July 22nd, 2002. This is often cited as the origin of narwhal popularity on Reddit.^[6]

An animation by Wonchop was posted to the Weebl's Stuff^[7] website on February 20th, 2009. On March 2nd, 2009, the "F--k Yeah Narwhals" Tumblr^[8] was created.

Derivatives

Search Interest

Search queries for "narwhal bacon" saw a slight bump in August of 2009, the same month as the original Reddit thread. As of July 2011, queries are reaching their highest spike. This may be in response to the r/f7u12 Reddit post on July 3rd.

External References