About

Tom Shoots Himself refers to an image of fictional animated character Tom putting a double barrel shotgun into animated character Jerry's mouse hole but does not realize that the rife is poking out of another hole, pointing directly at his head. It is frequently photoshopped and used in object labeling memes to comment on a particular subject that is unknowingly doing harm to themselves.

Origin

On November 23rd, 1944, the Tom and Jerry animated short film Mouse Trouble was released in the United States. In the film, Tom puts a shotgun in Jerry's mouse hole. The shotgun then wraps around and pushes through the wall to point directly at Tom's head (shown below).^[1]

The earliest known usage of a screen-capture of the scene was posted by 4chan ^[2] user Freeman on March 15th, 2015.

Spread

On September 10th, 2015, the image was used on the website FunnyJunk ^[3] by user udo. They captioned the post "online, notification pops and says that Felris just uploaded the new BT comp Aw **** son, I can't wait to read this ****, maybe I'll even be the first to come up with a really clever comme- where the **** did all these time travelers come from." The post (shown below, left) received more than 40 points.

One year later, on October 18th, 2016, the original image was posted on the /r/meirl subreddit,^[7] where it received more than 11,000 points (91% upvoted) and 150 comments.

The following year, on August 26th, 2017, Redditor ^[5] Lord_Treasurer posted the picture on the /r/neoliberal subreddit with the caption "Rare photo of white working-class man voting for Trump (Nov 2016, colorized)." The post (shown below, center) received more than 15,000 points (75% upvoted) and 1,100 comments in less than one year.

On September 29th, 2017, the English tabloid the Daily Mail^[4] published an object labeled variation of the image in the article "Busted! Ohio State student is exposed for CHEATING on his girlfriend on the college's public Snapchat – prompting people around the WORLD to slam him in series of furious messages" (shown below, right).

Several months later, on April 10th, 2018, Redditor^[6] nice_prax posted an object-labeled variation in the "/r/dankmemes subreddit, parodying an auto correct fail. The post (shown below) received more than 8,000 (97% upvoted) and 100 comments in two months.

Various Examples

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External References