Dat Boi is an absurdist meme from spring 2016: a low-resolution animated frog riding a unicycle, paired with the call “here come dat boi!” and the reply “o shit waddup!” Wikipedia describes it as “an Internet meme originating from the clip art website Animation Factory.” The joke has no deeper meaning; its appeal was the collision of a stock GIF with a nonsense greeting.
Origin
The AV Club summed it up in May 2016: “the meme is actually the collision of two, less popular memes.”
| Date | Step | Source |
|---|---|---|
| June 2, 2003 | The frog-on-a-unicycle GIF is uploaded to Animation Factory; an Animation Factory employee credits designer Josh Doohen | Wikipedia |
| June 2015 | Tumblr user phalania posts “here come dat boi!!” with a Pac-Man image captioned “o shit waddup!” | Know Your Meme |
| April 3, 2016 | The frog version of the meme appears | Daily Dot |
| May 2, 2016 | The Daily Dot publishes an explainer on the frog’s Animation Factory origins | Daily Dot |
| May 4, 2016 | Twitter user @MrMagDude finds the frog in his AP Physics textbook | Know Your Meme |
| May 13, 2016 | The AV Club quotes the Daily Dot: “we’ve already reached peak Dat Boi” | AV Club |
The Frog: Animation Factory Clip Art
The frog was never made for a meme. According to Wikipedia, the GIF was uploaded to Animation Factory on June 2, 2003, and an Animation Factory employee said it was created by designer Josh Doohen. The Daily Dot described Animation Factory as “a sort of Costco for weird animated GIFs,” whose artists “were told to devise whatever weird thing popped into their heads.” Know Your Meme traces the graphic to the Animation Factory Essential Collection 3.
The Caption: Pac-Man and “Mope”
The words came first. Wikipedia says the caption “was taken from memes involving ‘Here Comes Pacman’,” an animation based on the Pac-Man segment of the Bloodhound Gang song “Mope.” On Tumblr in June 2015, user phalania paired “here come dat boi!!” with a Pac-Man image, and the text kept circulating there for nearly a year, as the AV Club put it.
The Collision, Spring 2016
Wikipedia says the meme “garnered popularity on Tumblr in 2015 before gaining more recognition through Twitter in 2016.” The Daily Dot dates the frog version to April 3, 2016. On May 4, 2016, Twitter user @MrMagDude tweeted that the frog appeared in his AP Physics textbook; Know Your Meme reports the tweet had 11,000 retweets and 16,000 likes as of June 2017.
How It’s Used
The format is a two-line exchange: one person (or the frog) announces “here come dat boi!” and the reply is “o shit waddup!” Variations swap in other characters riding into frame. Its rise was fast enough that in June 2016, according to Wikipedia, Pepe creator Matt Furie said he was “devastated” that Dat Boi had begun to overshadow Internet Pepe; see #PepeTheFrog.