This week’s meme is one of the oldest and one of the best, Ha Ha Guy
The Back Story: Ha! Ha! Guy (or Quaker Guy) first appeared in a 19th century newspaper advertising “Forbes’ Insoluble Dry Plates. The advertisements had a cheery Anglican or Quaker laughing about using a insoluble dry plate.
The image reappeared around early 2003 on SomethingAwful where it had local use. Two and a half years later, it spread to Fark.com and became a hit. Ha Ha Guy appeared in almost every thread and began to get out of hand. Fark admins started issuing temporary bans on users who over posted the images to try and cut down on it’s use. This caused a backlash within the community and on July 15th, 2005 Fark admins created a page so everyone could get it out of their system and post Ha Ha Guy images to their hearts content. This was later referred to as “The Grey Wave.†Since then Ha Ha Guy has been hailed by many as the king of memes. It has the ability to be applied to almost anything and has even spawned into cross meme status where another meme theme is incorporated into it. Ha Ha Guy has also spawned into real life with Halloween costumes, t-shirts, white boards, etc.
The set up: Simple, use the image and add text to make it appear the guy is laughing about something.
