About

"You Know the Rules and So Do I" is a memorable line of lyrics from the song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. Online, people have used screenshots of Astley singing the line in the music video for the song as reaction image.

Origin

On July 27th, 1987, the song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley was released in the United States.^[1] In the song, Astley sings, "We're no strangers to love / You know the rules and so do I / A full commitment's what I'm thinking of / You wouldn't get this from any other guy." On October 25th, 2009, the Official Rick Astley YouTube channel uploaded the music video. The post received more than 660 million views in less than 11 years (shown below).

Three years after Rick Astley Official uploaded the video, YouTuber LinkittoMe posted an isolated clip of Astley singing "you know the rules and so do I." Within eight years, the post received more than 31,000 views (shown below).

Spread

In 2020, a screenshot of Astley singing the line became a widely-used image macro. On March 5th, 2020, Redditor ^[2] mijuzz7 posted the image as a reaction to a joke about fighting with their brother (shown below, left). The post received more than 19,000 points (95% upvoted) in less than one week.

Minutes later, Redditor^[3] Ulysses_Crowley shared a variation of the meme featuring an image of an upvote arrow at 68 upvotes, indicating that the rules require one to upvote the image to 69. The post received more than 10,000 points (89% upvoted) in less than one week (shown below, center).

Over the next week, the image saw more variations of the image. For example, on March 6th, Redditor^[4] tahzeerr shared an edited version of the image to references Uno. The post received more than 5,500 points (96% upvoted) in less than one week (shown below, right).

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Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References