It’s a credit to the patrons of the Krusty Krab that despite their roaring laughter at their humble fry cook, once they knew Squidward was weaponizing his diary, they came to their senses and told him to apologize.
The internet appears to have no such mercy. Taking a moment of nautical nonsense and fashioning it into a cudgel, Twitter, Reddit, and the web writ large yet again took a children’s cartoon and used it to poke holes in each other.
Season 9 episode 4a of Nickelodeon’s Spongebob Squarepants was titled “Little Yellow Book”, because in it, Squidward finds and reads Spongebob’s diary.
Reading it aloud to a Krusty Krab customer, it’s revealed that when Spongebob sees plaid he gets an uncontrollable urge to cluck like a chicken. This is demonstrated moments later when Mr. Krabs shows off his new kilt.
In May of 2017, this moment was immortalized on Twitter by user @OGBEARD, who posted a screenshot from the episode, and captioned it: ”How I stare back at kids when they stare for too long.”
The following day another Twitter user posted the same screenshot, but used it to mock her boyfriend.
This introduced the final component of the meme—a reiteration of the first sentence in sticky caps.
On the internet, the use of alternating or “sticky” caps denotes a high level of sarcasm and condescension. If Sponges had spines, Spongebob’s would need to break to contort himself into this chicken pose. By the same token, the idea is that someone’s brain would need to be broken in order to truly believe a sentiment attributed to them via sticky caps.
Someone’s brain would need to be broken if someone else is putting words in their mouth via sticky caps. In other words, the celebrity of Mocking Spongebob has a lot to do with the fact that the image is just as bent out of shape as the way the text reads, and just as stupid looking as the idea each meme is insulting.
As Mocking Spongebob took the internet by storm, on Reddit’s /r/MemeEconomy, user /u/jacobdotexe urged fellow redditors to “BUY AS MUCH AS YOU CAN”—suggesting it was about to be the next hottest thing in the meme world. Which it arguably was.
It reached the attention of mainstream media outlets, and for a moment was inescapable on social media.
This is probably the most well-known Spongebob meme, but it’s hardly the first and certainly not the last. It’d be hard to create a comprehensive list but, others include a version of Let Him Cook,
Push It Somewhere Else Patrick,
Increasingly Buff SpongeBob,
Caveman Spongebob,
and is Mayonnaise an Instrument.
Shortly after the initial spread of Mocking Spongebob, A photo later titled, “Human Mocking SpongeBob” was posted to a Facebook page called “Corporate Bro.”
Eventually, Nickelodeon even acknowledged the meme, using it as the animation for the Spongebob character’s taunt move in their platform fighting video game “Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl.”
“Little Yellow Book” ends with Squidward immobilized in a medieval pillory, punished by the citizens of Bikini Bottom for his unprovoked ridicule of poor Spongebob. He pickpockets our absorbent yellow friend, and in the final moments of the episode continues reading his diary, stating between belly laughs “I don’t care, this is so worth it.”
It’s a good thing for us that it’s all a work of fiction, because if the success of Mocking Spongebob is anything to go by, it seems like the internet would agree with him.
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