Pepe the Frog

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2005 · Matt Furie's comic Boy's Club, posted on Myspace; later 4chan · Also known as Pepe; Sad Frog; Smug Frog; Feels Frog; Feels Good Man; Rare Pepe

What it is

Pepe is a cartoon frog with a green face, big heavy-lidded eyes and thick brown lips, usually drawn in a blue T-shirt. He started as a character in a comic. People online then copied his face, redrew it and pasted it into their own pictures to show a feeling, such as a crying Pepe for sadness or a smirking Pepe for smugness. An image that strangers copy and change to make their own jokes is called a meme, and Pepe was one of the biggest.

Where it came from

The American cartoonist Matt Furie drew Pepe for his comic Boy's Club, which he posted on Myspace, a social website, in 2005. In one strip Pepe pulls his trousers right down to wee, and when a friend asks why, he says 'feels good man'. Around 2008 someone scanned that page and posted it on 4chan, an anonymous message board where users swapped images and jokes. 4chan users coloured him green and made a sad version, 'feels bad man'. He reached Tumblr by about 2012, Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj posted him in 2014, and by 2015 he was one of the most shared images on Tumblr and Twitter.

How people used it

Mostly people posted a Pepe face as a reply, in place of saying how they felt. A crying frog under a post about being lonely meant 'I know that feeling'. A smug frog meant 'told you so'. From around 2014, 4chan users called unusual hand-made versions 'rare Pepes' and pretended to trade them like collector's cards, and some were sold as paintings on eBay. When celebrities and people outside 4chan picked him up, 4chan users called them 'normies' and tried to make Pepe so offensive that outsiders would drop him. Later, Pepe faces became standard emotes on Twitch, small pictures viewers drop into the chat while watching someone play games live.

Why it mattered

His users liked him because one easy-to-redraw face could carry almost any mood. Then the fight over what he meant became the story. From 2015 some users made Pepes with Nazi and Ku Klux Klan imagery, and he got tied to Donald Trump's 2016 campaign after Trump shared a Pepe of himself. Hillary Clinton's campaign called him a white supremacist symbol, and the Anti-Defamation League added him to its hate symbol database while saying most uses weren't hateful. Furie drew Pepe's funeral in 2017 and sued Alex Jones's Infowars over a Pepe poster. In 2019 Hong Kong protesters adopted him, with Furie's approval. The 2020 documentary Feels Good Man covers all of it.

The jokes around it

• 'Feels good man': the original line from Boy's Club, posted for small pleasures.
• 'Feels bad man': the sad reversal, usually with a crying Pepe.
• Rare Pepe: an unusual version treated as a collectable, often stamped 'RARE PEPE DO NOT SAVE'.
• Smug Pepe: a smirking frog posted after winning an argument.
• monkaS: a sweating Pepe emote used in Twitch chat when something tense happens on stream.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Once Pepe was loose on an anonymous board, the man who drew him had almost no say over what he meant. The frog meant whatever the loudest group posting him wanted, and some of the push toward hate symbols started as a way to keep outsiders from using 4chan's joke.

What noah is not sure of

The Gaia Online stage, the 2012 dates for Tumblr's sad frog and Smug Pepe, and the claim that Pepe was the most retweeted meme of 2015 come from the source text and press lists and haven't been checked independently. The 2008 4chan upload date is approximate.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.