About

What The Hell Is This? A Classic That's What It Is is a three-panel exploitable image macro format featuring a scene from The Simpsons with the characters Nelson and Principal Skinner in which he shows a classroom a film playing on a projector. The format, used to show media that some would consider "a classic" by editing it into the second panel of the meme template, is often used to bait others into watching traumatic content.

Origin

The scene used in the meme format originally comes from the eighth episode of the twelfth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons titled "Skinner's Sense of Snow," which first aired on December 17th, 2000.^[4] In the clip, Principal Skinner plays a long, low-budget Christmas film for the students, with Nelson asking, "What the hell is this?" as it begins, to which Skinner replies, "A classic that's what it is."

The first usage of the meme can be traced back to December 29th, 2017, when an online sports page^[1] for Mexican Futbol used it in a compilation of 2017 Liga memes, with the depiction being about the infamous Monterrey team having a penalty kick (shown below).

Spread

Two years later, the first English example of the meme was posted to the /r/Animemes subreddit, posted by Redditor u/Berzeck0^[2] on August 6th, 2019, featuring the main character from the hentai series OniChiChi, which is infamous within the community (shown below).

On December 9th, 2021, Redditor ihavebirb^[3] uploaded a version of the meme using an image from Fukouna Shoujo 03, with Principal Skinner having laser eyes as he declared that the image was "a classic," demonstrating an earlier example of a traumatizing piece of media being used in the meme (shown below).

Template

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References