It’s election season, and everything is either confusing or unbelievably dumb. But how can we express our perplexity at the slew bad or misguided opinions flying around online? New meme! It’s this lady:
She’s the perfect reaction meme for those times when you spot something mind-bogglingly dumb. But what should we call her?
https://twitter.com/333333333433333/status/784054305607258112
“Math lady” is the most common name for the meme, and “confused lady” or “confused blond” also get thrown around. But the woman pictured is Brazilian soap star Renata Sorrah, known for her role on Senhora do Destino.
The “math lady” meme has been around for years, primarily in Brazil, according to Know Your Meme. It started out as a GIF…
Know Your Meme
…but has since evolved into its current form, a four-panel image covered in math equations and formulae. The obvious implication: What you are saying is as baffling as calculating the volume of a cone.
The first confused math lady joke to go viral in the U.S. was “when she tells you she’s 29 weeks pregnant,” on 9gag.
9gag
This makes sense, because 9gag has a lot of overlap with the Brazilian meme community—as recently as last year, Brazil was second only to the U.S. in number of 9gag visitors.
The math lady seems to have really taken off on U.S. Twitter over the past week or so. Even people on Reddit’s Out of the Loop subreddit are noticing it.
This hugely popular tweet probably helped:
https://twitter.com/HoIyIIIusion/status/782678556547641345
But it’s certainly not the only example:
now I know , why nate silver is so smart pic.twitter.com/PSU9yjJyws
— cthulhuey lewis & the news (@tresdessert) October 12, 2016
When stangers see me in public and try to figure out my gender pic.twitter.com/pUVmptdgiX
— Shamir (@ShamirBailey) September 28, 2016
https://twitter.com/Dory/status/780807217037578240
https://twitter.com/rooper_/status/760587982592245760
Me: I'll never get over that trig meme w the confused lady
Some1: it's not even that funny anymo
Me: pic.twitter.com/egogXP5IUE— 2020 oc year (@fuwwaaaa) October 11, 2016
Now you know what the math lady is about and where she came from, so you can see her in your timeline without being like…
Know Your Meme