![Bettina @HiddenSky FollowV "What do you do?" "I work at a bookstore." "You must love meeting authors and reading books all day!" "Actually, I often deal with potential theft, Code Brown' calls, and so on..." "Oh. *pause* I didn't see [title] on the shelf when I was there. It's in the back, right?"](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/list/001/379/596/18b.jpg "Book Salesman")
What Do You Do?
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| About • Origin • Spread • Various Examples • Search Interest • External References • Recent Images |
About
What Do You Do? is a dialogue snowclone popular on Twitter in which a person says what they do for a living and another person asks them questions, resulting in the first person getting frustrated and making a hyperbolic joke. The format plays out in a similar fashion to the Where Are You From? meme.
Origin
On June 1st, 2018, Twitter user @Chemjobber[1] started the snowclone by using the "Where Are You From?" format to describe their job as a chemist. The tweet gained over 1,600 retweets and 9,300 likes (shown below).
Spread
In the following days, other Twitter users picked up the format to describe their profession. Many of these were related to media jobs. For example, Twitter user @justjuliawhelan did the joke about her profession as an audiobook narrator, gaining over 100 retweets and 17,00 likes (shown below, left). User Joe Posnanski made the joke about being a sportswriter, gaining over 180 retweets and 1,300 likes (shown below, right).
Other professions cited in popular tweets include doctors and psychology professors (shown below).
The jokes were covered by Twitter Moments,[2] Inverse,[3] and Independent.[4] Select All[5] also covered the meme but was critical of it, saying it was mostly a format used for people to humblebrag.
Various Examples
![Bettina @HiddenSky FollowV "What do you do?" "I work at a bookstore." "You must love meeting authors and reading books all day!" "Actually, I often deal with potential theft, Code Brown' calls, and so on..." "Oh. *pause* I didn't see [title] on the shelf when I was there. It's in the back, right?"](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/379/596/18b.jpg "Book Salesman")
Search Interest
External References
[1] Twitter – @chemjobber
[2] Twitter Moments – Not everyone likes being asked 'what do you do?'
[3] Inverse – These Are the 29 Best "What Do You Do?" Memes on Twitter
[4] Independent – What do you do? The question so annoying it’s spawned a meme
[5] Select All – Please Stop the ‘What Do You Do?’ Meme An Intervention
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