About

"Very Poor Choice of Words" is a memorable quote uttered by the character the Joker in the 2008 superhero action film The Dark Knight. Online, screenshots of the character saying the line has been featured in a series of reaction image macros.

Origin

On July 14th, 2008, Warner Bros. Studios released the film The Dark Knight.^[1] In the film, the antagonist the Joker (portrayed Heath Ledger) infiltrates a campaign fundraiser, where he holds the character Rachel Dawes (portrayed by Maggie Gyllenhaal) out of a window. The film's protagonist, Batman (portrayed by Christian Bale), warns Joker to "Let her go." Joker responds, "Very poor choice of words," and drops her from the window.

On December 9th, 2010, YouTuber IQuip4U published a clip of the scene. The post received more than 36,000 views within 10 years (shown below).

Spread

Four years later, on September 28th, 2014, the Wordpress blog Game Gossip Blog^[2] published a meme about the name of the console Xbox360. Underneath the image of a man saying "Fortunately we have a product for people who aren't able to stay connected. It's called Xbox360," the meme features a screenshot of Joker saying the line (shown below, left).

Two years, on September 22nd, 2016, Tumblr ^[3] user tomshardy shared a series of GIFs featuring the moment. The post received more than 11,000 notes in less than four years (shown below, center).

People continued to share variations of the meme over the next four years. On August 7th, 2019, Redditor ^[4] ImFullOfSalt shared a variation of the meme with the top image reading "Disney erects giant Woody at Hollywood Studios." The meme received more than 11,000 points (98% upvoted) in less than one year (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References