Long Boy

Confirmed 192,456

Part of a series on Layers of Irony. [View Related Entries]

About

"Haha, Long Boy" refers to an instant message containing a clipart of an orange-colored cylinder that was sent by an anonymous Facebook user to the administrators of the Facebook group Special Meme Fresh in late February 2016. Shortly after receiving the message, the group posted a screenshot of the bizarre exchange to its blog on Tumblr, spawning a series of photoshopped parodies and other forms of shitposts on the microblogging platform.

Origin

On February 24th, 2016, Special Meme Fresh featured a Q&A post via its Tumblr blog^[1] in response to an anonymous user's question about the layers of irony webcomic, which described a list of ten different levels in understanding ironic humor.

"Could you list the layers of irony? What happens on each level, and when does each layer of irony no longer is fresh plz, thank"

Among the different levels, the description of the fifth layer stood out as exceptionally odd, which read:

"you send your friend a pic of a cylinder and say “haha long boy." they unfriend you"

Within the first two weeks, the group's Tumblr blog post^[2] garnered more than 2,400 notes. That same day, Special Meme Fresh posted a screenshot of a Facebook Messenger dialogue fitting the description of the "fifth level" to its Facebook page, where it accrued over 1,300 likes and 163 shares over the same time period.

Spread

On February 26th, 2016, Special Meme Fresh posted a picture of the orange-colored cylinder captioned with the phrase "who are you? im you but longer" to its Tumblr blog.^[3] In less than two weeks, the post gained more than 10,000 notes.^[2]