If I was the guy in this meme there would just be a huge blank space. [via smosh]
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Keywords:couple in bed i wonder what he's thinking he's probably thinking about girls i bet he's thinking of other woman couple he must be thinking about x i bet he's thinking about other girls guy thinking in bed
Over the past week or so, you might have seen on your various social-media timelines an image of the fellow above — a guy tapping his finger on his head, having just thought of something. He’s figured out a way to avoid his problems, and is passing it along to you as a genius strategy.
You can't be broke if you don't check your bank account pic.twitter.com/brpgiWflym
— Ryan (@RyanWindoww) January 23, 2017
The guy pictured is Reece Simpson, a.k.a. Roll Safe, a character created by the British filmmaker and actor Kayode Ewumi. He’s the protagonist of #HoodDocumentary, a parody of urban-culture documentaries. As Bim Adewunmi of BuzzFeed described the series early last year:
If #HoodDocumentary were real, it’s fair to say its primary audience would be white, looking to “learn something” about the urban youths of whom they’ve read so much. With that in mind, then, the show is a send-up on two fronts: a straight-up mockumentary with a fictional protagonist, but also a weighted nod and wink to the consumers of this sort of programming.
This particular image comes one minute and 33 seconds into a version of #HoodDocumentary that Ewumi made for the BBC in June. It’s shown up everywhere, almost out of nowhere.
A few months later, the pic was adopted as a reaction image by distinctly British accounts with names like Footy Humour (American vernacular: Soccer Humor), before making its way across the Atlantic to the U.S.
In late January, R.S. exploded on Black Twitter as an avatar of logical-fallacies-cum-lifehacks.
No one can hurt you if you detach yourself from everything and avoid becoming emotionally invested in anyone pic.twitter.com/VavUoE91YH
— leighsandra (@loxvatos) January 31, 2017
you don't have to take off your bra at the end of the day if you don't wear a bra pic.twitter.com/5kS7BXkb2H
— rose 🥀 (@amararose_) February 4, 2017
You don't have to shoot a man if you throw him out of a plane. pic.twitter.com/PzMJ71Fw0c
— neontaster (@neontaster) February 3, 2017
While it’s not unprecedented to see this kind of transatlantic, U.K.-U.S. cultural accord around a single meme, it is interesting that this one in particular translated so well, and so quickly, from one context to another. What do Great Britain and the United States have in common, in this particular moment, that lethargy and fatalism would be attractive and widely understood modes of being?
You don't have to post a jpg if you have a gif pic.twitter.com/xiH6xj4RWv
— 2C (@Cellix1) February 5, 2017
You won't be mad at me for being late if you stop thinking I'm gonna be on time. pic.twitter.com/SerRoBO10B
— Jamilah, Age 34 (@JamilahLemieux) January 31, 2017
You'll never know if you don't go, you'll never shine if you don't glow pic.twitter.com/DZtiRfQCD6
— memes (@memeprovider) February 2, 2017
Thanks to a pair of shocking elections last year, won in each case by a campaign almost entirely divorced from reality, both Brits and Americans are confronting a world in which it seems that the easiest way to deal with one’s problems is to pretend that they don’t even exist — or to recast them as benefits. You can’t be depressed if you were never happy in the first place.