Like the greatest superheroes of all time, if you make yourself more than just a meme, if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely: A legend.
Dat Boi Begins
It’s hard to pin down exactly when the phrase “Dat Boi” hit the internet, but it goes at least as far back as an Urban Dictionary post in 2005. Nearly ten years later, in July 2014, a Funnyjunk user photoshopped an image of a boy, giving him a huge afro and mustache and labeling him “Dat Boi.”
We see it next as a series of Tumblr posts in the following years, often featuring Pac-Man. One in 2015 ultimately earned upwards of 100,000 notes. At the time, it was a fun little phrase that could be attached to just about anything.
It wasn’t until 2016, that we see it combined with the GOAT of all weird internet Gifs: A unicycling frog, which came to social media courtesy of an artist named Josh Doohen on an old clipart repository called “Animation Factory.”
The Frog
It quickly became a cult hit worshipped in deep-ish early meme circles. It was a fun, completely random, and a totally niche way to express nothing at all, culminating in a Flash Game, a Facebook page titled “Addicts of Tumblr,” and a YouTube video, which today has 17 million views.
It was just about enthusiasm itself, and expressing it in the most avant-garde way possible. And enthusiasm it sure brought—maybe a little too much.
How we killed Dat Boi
Which brings us to the inevitable moment where we need to report on our own reporting.
The day before the YouTube video went up, The Daily Dot published an article titled “The enduring legend of Dat Boi, the unicycling frog.” In the three days beginning the day before this article was published, and ending the day after, Google search interest for “Dat Boi” appears to have jumped over 400%, which you’d think fans would have been happy about.
But, in a bizarre twist, it was enough to draw the ire of the hipster memers who had originally stanned Dat Boi.
You never know what is going to make internet dwellers angry, and in this case, apparently, shining a spotlight on their weird meme folk hero was enough. The rationale for the hatred was that things are cool when they’re your own secret treasure, and they’re lame when the normies all find out.
In a follow up piece titled “I killed your meme, and I don’t care” (which, you should go read because it’s hilarious), author Miles Klee summed the whole thing up by saying “They’re frustrated that the very mechanism of virality makes it impossible to hoard premium memes.”
Fair enough. But it’s not like they didn’t try.
Dat Boi endures
The following year, after the hype had died down, a Reddit user on /r/me_ irl posted 12 posts each with a single letter, then got the rest of the subreddit to upvote them in order so that when viewed at the subreddit level, they spelled out our meme hero’s catchphrase, “o s*** waddup.”
And in salute and congratulations, another user drakeposted it, suggesting that this series of events was far more impressive than even the moon landing. Months after that, another Redditor, /u/futuretimeguy12, tried to resuscitate our boi once again—this time by rallying /r/me_irl users around what he described as a “Dat Boi Renaissance.”
This caused /r/me_irl to be flooded with Dat Boi memes and spin-offs yet again, but rather than reclaiming the virality it once had, this time Dat Boi seems to have stayed pretty much confined to the depths of Reddit. Which, given the whole saga, is perhaps where Dat Boi fans want their champion in the first place.
First, the unicycle teeters one way, with them wanting it to remain in hipsterdom, next it teeters the other, with them wanting it to be huge.
In either scenario, you cannot kill an idea.
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