Dat Boi
You might remember it as unicycle frog, here come dat boi
The archive does not hold a copy of this image that it may show.
2016·The platform era·unexpected
A stock clip-art frog on a unicycle, announced with total ceremony, and funny for no locatable reason.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- unicycle frog
- Spread in
- 2016
- Where it started
- tumblr
- Format
- GIF
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
A low-quality animated frog pedals across the screen on a unicycle. Somebody announces its arrival — here come dat boi — and somebody else responds: o shit waddup. The frog is stock clip art from a company called Animation Factory. It has no story, no character and no origin joke.
It is the clearest specimen of post-ironic meme humour: a thing that is funny because it is being treated as significant, and for no other available reason. It circulated on Tumblr through 2015 and broke out on Twitter in 2016, and the A.V. Club's attempt to explain it concluded, essentially, that there was nothing to explain — which is the correct answer and a useful marker of where meme culture had got to.
Dat Boi became the reference case for a whole class of 2016 memes that resist interpretation, and for the argument about whether that resistance was a joke about meaninglessness or simply meaninglessness. It burned out inside a year, as such things do.
Why it is here: copied, redrawn and reused until the original stopped mattering · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
This spread as an animated file passed from person to person, not as a video upload. Originally published on Tumblr.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This spread as an animated file passed from person to person, not as a video upload. Originally published on Tumblr.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.