About

This Is So Sad Alexa Play Despacito is a catchphrase and phrasal template of a mock conversation between a user and their Alexa digital assistant. Online, people replace the song "Despacito" with other songs for humorous effect.

Origin

The earliest known usage of the phrase was posted by the Tumblr ^[1] account bisexuael on June 19th, 2018. The post (shown below) received more than 41,000 notes in one week.

Precursor

This Is So Sad refers to posts made in parody of posts like 5ever in which a scene of dialogue dramatically results in a character committing suicide before the other character can finish their sentence, and the bottom containing a caption with "This is so sad!" and positing some variation of "can we hit 50 likes?" and the character Sarcastic Bro on the far right corner. These posts began spreading on Reddit in early 2018. At the end of the posts, a line of text would read "This is so sad! Can we reach (X) likes?" The format was picked up in many Deep Fried Memes and shitposts.

Spread

Several days later, people began using the phrase and adding different musical acts and songs at the end of the phrase. On June 23rd, for example, Tumblr^[2] user evilanelle posted "this is so sad alexa play sos by the jonas brothers." Within one week, the post (shown below, left) received more than 5,600 notes.

Days later, on June 27th, Tumblr^[3] user lesbianbey posted "this is so sad alexa play the winter soldier theme." The post (shown below, center) received more than 995 notes in less than 24 hours.

The phrase also appeared on other websites, such as Twitter. On June 27th, using the phrase in reference to the 2018 World Cup, Twitter^[4] user @seokjinuchiha wrote, "can't believe Germany lost and all of México collectively went 'this is so sad alexa play fake love by bts.'" The post (shown below) received more than 15,000 retweets and 37,000 likes in 24 hours.

Several media outlets covered the popularity of the meme, including The Daily Dot, ^[5] New York magazine^[6] and more.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References