About

Well Fuck is a reaction image macro meme based on a screenshot from the 2018 Billion Surprise Toys children's nursery rhyme video "Listen to Your Parents." The meme depicts a young boy reading a book with his eyes and mouth agape. His facial expression has been re-interpreted as surprise and disbelief and frequently accented with the addition of the subtitle "Well fuck," which appears at the bottom of the image.

Origin

On June 2nd, 2018, Billion Surprise Toys, a children's nursery rhyme YouTube channel,^[1] published the video "Listen to Your Parents." At the beginning of the video, a young boy can be seen reading with his eyes and mouth open on the left side of the frame. The video received more than 24 million views in less than three years (shown below).

The following year, on February 9th, 2019, Redditor rshelver posted the earliest available meme of the screenshot, which features the boy reading and the caption, "me: it's fine I studied for this test *looks at first problem*," in the /r/MemeEconomy^[2] subreddit. The post received more than 1,000 points (97% upvoted) and 85 comments in less than two years (shown below).

Spread

One year later, the meme spread to Twitter and began to go viral on the platform. On February 6th, 2020, Twitter^[3] user @__BigO__ tweeted the image with the caption, "I overheard two coworkers talking today about food and shit….one said 'when my daddy died, we had fried chicken, greens, Mac and cheese, corn bread and peach cobbler'….so the other coworker gonna say 'damn…his ass need to die again'….y’all." The tweet received more than 73,000 likes and 18,000 retweets in less than one year (shown below, left).

Two months later, on April 2nd, the same user, @__BigO__, tweeted^[4] the image with the caption, "My barber just sprayed my head with Lysol…" The tweet received more than 101,000 likes and 15,000 retweets in less than one year (shown below, center).

That day, on April 2nd, 2020, an unknown Redditor in the /r/memes^[5] posted the first available variation to feature the "Well fuck" chyron. They captioned the meme, "196/195 total countries infected," which referred to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The post received more than 34,000 points (98% upvoted) and 230 comments in less than one year (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References