Woke Toddler

About

The Woke Toddler is a series of Twitter jokes where the poster makes up a fantastical story about their precocious child asking them a question about politics.

Origin

While its difficult to tell when the first Woke Toddler joke appeared on Twitter, some of the earlier known instances of the "Woke Toddler" joke as its known include @kalebhorton's tweet^[7] about his boy's refrigerator magnets, posted November 18th, 2014, and @SeanMcElwee's tweeted story^[1] about his two-year old daughter (shown below).

Spread

The joke format stuck around as an ironic contrast^[2] to people who sincerely tweeted^[3] their kids' reactions to the election until March 21st, 2016, when Esquire columnist Stephen Marche tweeted,^[4] "My 4 yr old daughter, seeing a picture of Donald Trump, asks me 'why is that man so afraid daddy?' 'I don't know, sweetheart, I don't know.'"

Doubting the validity of Marche's story, Weird Twitter began directly mocking Marche,^[5][6] and coming up with variations of their own.^[8]

Though Marche repeatedly swore his story was true,^[9] it did not stop Twitter in their mockery, leading the Daily Dot's Jay Hathaway^[10] to posit that it was not the lie that was skewered, but the "smarmy, disingenuous… conceit that it's somehow novel for a child to inherit his parents' political alignment, class consciousness, or fears for the future."

My Son, 3, Who Is a Lot Smarter Than I Am

On May 21st, 2018, Twitter user @hinxminx tweeted a supposed observation from her toddler, attributing it to "My son, 3, who is a lot smarter than I am" (shown below).

This sparked a wave of Woke Toddler jokes, as people wrote observations and facetiously attributed them to their children. One of the most popular was tweeted by @WoolyBully69 making a point about the 2018 World Cup that gained over 24,000 retweets and 125,000 likes (shown below, left). User @butsay tweeted a joke quoting Jay-Z's verse from Kanye West's "Monster," gaining over 60 retweets and 430 likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

External References