2016·The platform era
Dat Boi
A stock clip-art frog on a unicycle, announced with total ceremony, and funny for no locatable reason.
You might remember it as unicycle frog, here come dat boi
A looping animation
This Moment spread as an animated file passed from person to person, not as a video upload. Originally published on Tumblr.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
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 first appeared in 2016, during the platform era.
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.
More from 2016
- Baby Shark Dance 2016The platform era
- Chewbacca Mask Lady 2016The platform era
- Damn Daniel 2016The platform era
- We Are Number One 2016The platform era
- Bottle flipping 2016The platform era
- Exploding watermelon stunt 2016The platform era
- Harambe 2016The platform era
- PPAP (Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen) 2016The platform era
- Juju on That Beat 2016The platform era
- Running Man Challenge 2016The platform era
The platform era
- Instagram egg 2019The platform era
- Dancing Pallbearers 2017The platform era
- Lofi Girl 2017The platform era
- Dab dance 2015The platform era
- Storm Area 51 2019The platform era
- Renegade dance 2019The platform era
- The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet 2019The platform era
- The Backrooms 2019The platform era
- Kiki Challenge 2018The platform era
- Crab Rave 2018The platform era
Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment 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.
- What happens
- 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.