What The Fuck Is Oatmeal

About

What The Fuck Is Oatmeal refers to a series of image macros, shitposts and memes using variations of the statement "I don't want to get political or anything, but what the fuck is oatmeal?" Many responses to the question feature references to the 1, 2 Oatmeal meme.

Origin

Variations of the question began appearing on Reddit in 2018. Me.me has a variation featuring a deep fried variation that was scraped on May 4th, 2018 from the /r/deepfriedmemes subreddit.^[6] The image features Star Wars character R2-D2 and the question "I hate to be the one to ask but what the fuck is oatmeal." However, the post has since been deleted.

The next time it appeared on the site was when it was posted by Redditor^[7] bjtags20 in the /r/me_irl subreddit on September 26th, 2018. The post received more than 1,000 points (98% upvoted) and 30 comments (shown below).

Precursor

The question "what is oatmeal?" has been posted on various social networks since as early as 2009. One of the earliest includes a tweet ^[2] by @Schackii_C (shown below).

Spread

On November 22nd, Redditor^[1] Portune-Fortune on the /r/okbuddyretard subreddit. The post featured the cartoon character Garfield wearing a construction workers outfit and the caption "I don't want to get political or anything but what the fuck is oatmeal?" The post received more than 3,600 points (100% upvoted) and 60 comments (shown below).

Following the post, people began posting the question on various images creating a bit of a non-sequitur. On January 19th, 2019, Redditor^[3] Moonlitsonata2 posted a variation (shown below, left).

Several months later, on July 4th, Redditor^[4] jacobubrahjripjah a version featuring a dog in a wheelchair staring at the ocean in /r/comedyheaven subreddit--thought it had appeared in various subreddits prior to this. The post received more than 23,000 points (97% upvoted) and 200 comments in about two months (shown below, right).

On July 16th, the Instagram ^[5] account @what_the_fuck_is_oatmeal launched. The account posts the same meme featuring the dog every day as of September 5th (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References