Forwards From Grandma

Submission 22,596

About

Forwards From Grandma is a genre of memes that are typically enjoyed by the elderly and sent to their grandchildren or that parody that type of image via email. These usually include memes featuring politically conservative viewpoints, illogical juxtapositions between animated characters, like Minions, and motivational expressions and chain letters.

Origin

While people likely complained or joked about the messages the receive from their parents or grandparents offline for years, the earliest known usage of "Forwards From Grandma" online was posted on the blog Ahh Yeah^[1] on July 3rd, 2008. That day, they posted "I’m starting a new series of blogs titled “Forwards from Grandma”. I’m only going to post the ones that are true. About half don’t pass the Snopes.com test." The images on the site were of disaster photos from a tornado and flood in Iowa.

Spread

Three years later, on December 9th, 2011, Redditor^[4] Eduard_Khil launched the subreddit /r/forwardsfromgrandma. The subreddit suggests users "Only submit content that fits the spirit of this subreddit (Something grandma FWD'd to you, shared with Facebook, cut out and put on her fridge, etc) and try to start submissions with, "FWD" or any variation thereof. No satire please, even if it goes over your Grandma's head." As of February 2018, more than 147,000 users subscribe to the subreddit (example posts below).

On September 9th, 2012, Redditor ^[2] dissonance07 published a scale to rate a post of teenagers reenacting a childhood photo. They wrote "TO put the hilarity of this in context" and then published an ASCII-style scale from "The finer points of contract law" to "Forwards from Grandma."

The following year, on April 17th, 2013, BuzzFeed ^[3] posted a listicle called "The 42 Types of Emails Forwards Your Grandparents Send You." The post outlines several email classificaitons grandparents send, including "The 'Back In My Day…' Email" and "The 'Video Games Have Ruined Everything' Email" (examples below).

On February 3rd, 2014, Redditor^[5] BLATANTLY_POTATO started the parody subreddit /r/forwardsfromhitler. The purpose of the subreddit is to "Share and make fun of Nazi, racist and Neo-Nazi propaganda." The subreddit has more than 13,000 subscribers in four years.^[6]

Months later, on October 10th, Redditor^[7] Sharknado_1 started the /r/ForwardsFromKlandma, which also parodies /r/forwardsfromgrandma with the aim to "mock racists and the other horrible characters from the so-called 'alt-right'." As of February 2018, the subreddit has more than 14,000 subscribers (example below).