The ‘C’mon, do something’ meme (or do something meme for short) has origins dating back to a 2003 webcomic, though it wasn’t until 2015 that it started being employed as we know it today. It’s a simple concept: You’re frustrated with someone or something being inactive, and you want the person or thing or week or whatever else it might be to “do something.”
And then you poke it with a stick.
Here’s how it started and how it lives on today.
Origins of the ‘c’mon, do something’ meme
According to Know Your Meme, a 2003 webcomic called White Ninja “began selling merchandise featuring an illustration of the White Ninja character poking a dead fish with a stick.” A Twitter account launched in March 2015 to help archive the series used that image as its avatar.
Three months after that account launched, the image was applied as a meme in Reddit. An apparently disgruntled game player showed the image in a post, but instead of poking a dead fish, White Ninja was poking a distorted logo for The Simpsons: Tapped Out mobile game. In a subreddit devoted to that game, r/tappedout, Redditor KayakBassFisher posted it with the caption, “C’mon…….do something.”
How it spread
Know Your Meme reports that Redditors and Facebook users following the National Football League inserted logos of teams, including one of the Patriots that ended up on the NFL Memes Facebook page on Feb. 5, 2017. (That was the day of that year’s Super Bowl, in which the Patriots fell behind 28-3 but then indeed “did something,” making an epic comeback to win 34-28.)
From there, it took a bit of a dark turn, with a Redditor on r/dankmemes submitting a picture of White Ninja and the captions, “When you ran out of memes” and then, “C’mon, do a world war,” with the stick poking flags representing the U.S. and various adversaries.
How it’s used today
The presence of multiple online meme generators, and even a shirt begging Bitcoin to do something (which can be purchased on a site called CryptoGoodies) indicates that it’s a versatile and well-trafficked meme. Whether it’s applied to your favorite sports team, the Supreme Court, Congress, or the week not being Friday yet, the “do something” meme allows you to poke anything that’s not moving enough for your liking.