About

White People at the Function is a snowclone used in a series of memes that imagine positive reactions from white people when a certain stereotypical item is present at a social gathering, typically using the phrasal template "white people at the function when X," a variant of the "White People When" phrasal template. Spawned in July 2022, the format saw continuous presence in the following months, often illustrated in GIF captions with a video of four people Irish dancing to "Lights" by Ellie Goulding.

Origin

On January 20th, 2020, Twitter^[1] user @itsMalikEl tweeted, "White people when Sweet Caroline start playing at the function," quote tweeting an image of SpongeBob SquarePants singing on a stage. The post (shown below) gained over 360 retweets and 2,200 likes in three years.

The joke did not spawn a meme until July 13th, 2022, when iFunny^[2] user B1BattleDroid posted a video caption meme joking about "white people at the function when Cha Cha real smooth comes on." The post (shown below) gained over 1,400 smiles in seven months.

On July 15th, Instagram^[3] user homosexual_avocado reposted the meme, with the post gaining over 5,400 likes and 22,100 views in seven months.

Spread

On July 23rd, 2022, Instagram^[4] user bruhloon posted a video caption meme using the format which paired a version of the caption with a viral video of four Irish people dancing by @_cairde. The post gained over 18,800 likes and 86,000 views and was widely circulated online in the following months.

Starting in December 2022, the meme format achieved notable popularity online across Twitter, Reddit and Instagram. For example, on December 7th, Twitter^[5] user @poly_psywork posted a version that gained over 30 retweets and 200 likes in two months and was reposted multiple times in the following weeks (shown below, left). On January 7th, 2023, Twitter^[6] user @dhardjr posted a meme that received over 1,100 retweets and 7,500 likes in one month (shown below, right).

The format maintained significant virality online throughout early 2023.

@_cairde Response

On Jun 15th, 2023, Irish dance group Cairde, whose video had often been used for video captions, posted their own White People at the Function meme that received over 1.2 million views and 218,000 views on TikTok^[7] in one month (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References