Members of 4chan, a no-holds-barred online message board, are on a constant, unwavering quest to destroy everything. This includes Mountain Dew promotional campaigns and the sanctity of the human body (NSFW, as if you couldn’t guess).
But one of the subforum /b/’s more recent targets has been the wonderfully innocent world of Sesame Street.
The game is simple: Isolate an out-of-context photo from the beloved educational show, then add some disturbing narrative text at the bottom. The results are like pages from a children’s book, if children’s books were Satanic and intended to traumatize. Here are some examples:
4chan
4chan
4chan
4chan
Pretty sick, right? You can never underestimate 4chan’s ability to find the darkness in any situation or repurpose apparently harmless source material for shocking effect. There’s something inherently hilarious about watching the image take the exact, incriminating shape that the text implies. It’s probably my favorite running meme on the Internet right now.
4chan
4chan
4chan
4chan
4chan
4chan
4chan
And, of course, my all-time favorite:
4chan
We’ll keep you posted on any other relevant 4chan/Sesame Street crossovers, and we’re also actively looking for confirmation on whether or not Bert is, indeed, a Vietnam veteran.
Illustration by Tiffany Pai