About

This Male Has Overslept is an exploitable image macro series featuring captioned screenshots of a garter snake emerging from the snow from the 2009 BBC nature documentary series Life, who is described as having "no chance of mating" after sleeping too late.

Origin

On October 19th, 2009, the BBC released the second episode of Life titled "Reptiles and Amphibians," which features a male garter snake who has overslept while other rivals are attempting to mate, that proceeds to emit female pheromones to trick other males into warming his body temperature (shown below).

David Attenborough: "This male has overslept. He will need hours to warm up. At the moment he stands no chance of mating."

On May 10th, 2015, Redditor Nick6281 posted screenshots from the episode, captioned with the narration "This male has overslept" / "At the moment, he stands no chance of mating" (shown below). Prior to being archived, the post gained over 31,000 points (96% upvoted) and 270 comments on /r/me_irl.^[2]

Spread

The following day, Tumblr user iraffiruse^[1] reposted the captioned screenshots, which gathered upwards of 77,100 notes in two years. On October 21st, 2015, the Men's Humor Facebook^[5] page posted the image with the heading "My spirit animal" (shown below, left). Within two years, the post garnered over 18,000 reactions and 2,500 shares. On December 27th, 2015, Redditor tony_lo submitted the screenshots captioned with the joke "When you miss that 'You up?' text" to /r/BlackPeopleTwitter,^[3] where it received more than 6,100 points (94% upvoted) and 60 comments prior to being archived (shown below, right).

On May 15th, 2016, the Meme Center Facebook^[4] page posted a photoshopped version of the screenshots with a cutout of Wojack over the snakes head (shown below). Within one year, the post gained over 1,700 reactions and 120 shares.

On June 24th, Redditor RedVodka19 submitted a photoshopped version of the image featuring the character Sportacus from LazyTown to /r/dankmemes^[7] (shown below, left). On June 26th, 2017, Redditor bad_username17 posted the screenshots edited with the caption "This male likes anime" to /r/me_irl^[6] (shown below). The following day, The Daily Dot^[8] published an article titled "Use the sleepy snake meme to let people know they’re never gonna get laid."

Search Interest

External References