About

"This Is Not a Pipe" Parodies are a series of images parodying René Magritte's La trahison des images ("The Treachery of Images"), a famous painting in which Magritte drew an image of a tobacco pipe and captioned it "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," which translates to "This is Not a Pipe."

Origin

In 1928, Magritte began working on "The Treachery of Images."^[1] The painting became famous for its meta message, making the viewer aware that what it is seeing depicted in art is merely a representation of the thing itself. In a Magritte biography by Harry Torczyner, Magritte is quoted as saying:

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture 'This is a pipe', I'd have been lying!

Spread

The famousness of the painting and its relevance to visual art made it ripe for parody in the following decades. TV Tropes^[2] hosts a collection of variations on the image's text in popular TV, Film, and Web media. For example, to demonstrate the trope, they present a picture of a single-frame comic drawn by Dan Piraro in 1997 (shown below).

Magritte's painting became a popular reference with the dawn of internet memes, appearing in early memes such Advice Animals and Rage Comics in the late 2000s (examples shown below).

The painting proved adaptable to many meme templates over the coming years. In 2014, Pipesmagazine forum poster misterlowercase^[3] posted a large compilation of various "This Is Not a Pipe" variations. The phrase has also been adapted to memes including Pepe, Bitch I Might Be, and Actually it's about ethics in gaming journalism (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References