What Is 'Lord Marquaad E' And Why Is Markiplier's Face On Lord Farquaad? An Inscrutable Relic From Meme History Explained

Of all the many inscrutable memes throughout meme history, perhaps none encapsulates the pure nonsense of memeing like "Lord Marquaad E." Here is a meme intentionally and spectacularly bereft of meaning. There is no punchline. There is exactly one letter's worth of caption. Its main character is a ghastly amalgamation of three different memetic figures. Yet it has endured through the years as perhaps the all-time weirdest image the internet pumped into the algorithm.

What Is The "Lord Marquaad E" Meme?

In the simplest terms, "Lord Marquaad E" is an image of popular YouTuber Markiplier superimposed onto the head of Shrek villain Lord Farquaad superimposed onto the body of Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg at his 2018 congressional hearings, captioned "E."

Simple enough for you?

How Did "Lord Marquaad E" Become A Meme?

"Lord Marquaad E" is very much a product of its time. In the late 2010s, there was something of a race to see how absurd meme humor could go. This resulted in some truly surreal memes, such as Hey Beter and the Meme Man series, but Lord Marquaad took a few years to become fully formed.

In 2015, Twitter user cydago posted a photoshop superimposing Markiplier's face onto Lord Farquaad's body.

Three years later, the Tumblr blog photo-frier put the image through a deep fried filter captioning it only with the letter E.

At the time, "deep frying" a meme, meaning to dramatically lower the jpeg's quality, was a sort of shorthand for absurd humor, which was likely why the caption merely read "E." It was an intentionally absurd image with no deeper meaning, and the humor was in seeing how meticulously senseless the meme could become.

The final piece was the Mark Zuckerberg congress hearings, which seemed as good a place as any to fit in Lord Marquaad. This made it to /r/deepfriedmemes on April 13th, and the legendary meme hit the internet.

How Has Lord Marquaad E Spread?

Unlike some other absurd memes from that era of the internet, Lord Marquaad E has maintained some staying power as arguably the most absurd meme to ever take off. It seemed to fit into myriad templates, and was easy enough to riff on — after all, there were 25 more letters to utilize in a potential meme series.

While we have seen more absurd memes since the rise of Lord Marquaad E (Skibidi Toilet comes to mind), few have seemed the product of a collective race towards absurdism quite like "Farquazuckerplier." The context surrounding the meme is slowly fading into history, leaving only the bizarre end product behind:

E.

For more information, check out Lord Marquaad E on Know Your Meme.