About

You Mess With Crabo, You Get a Stabo is a snowclone in which an animal or object is shown in a threatening position with the caption "If you mess with X, you get Y. In the snowclone, Y rhymes with X, with at least one of the words intentionally misspelled for humorous effect.

Origin

In February of 2016, a video of a crab apparently wielding a knife went viral (shown below).

A year later, on March 21st, 2017, Twitter user @biggestmate^[1] tweeted a screenshot of the knife-wielding crab captioned "you mess with crabo, you get a stabo." The tweet gained 9,200 retweets and 14,000 likes (shown below).

Spread

As the tweet spread over the course of the day, it was reposted by several meme-focused accounts without credit.^[2] On Facebook, it was posted by T h e M e m e A e s t h e t i c^[3] where it gained over 17,000 likes and reactions and over 53,000 shared. On /r/me_irl,^[5] a screenshot of the tweet gained over 15,700 votes. Meanwhile, some variations began appearing in response to @biggestmate's tweet. A few hours after his tweet, user @Octopusuu^[4] tweeted an image macro of a lizard holding a thumbtack reading "You mess with gecko you get a pecko" (shown below).

The variations became a popular trend on meme-focused subreddits in the following week, appearing on /r/dankmemes,^[6] /r/me_irl, and /r/memeeconomy.^[7]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References