What Is The 'Awkward Look Monkey Puppet' Meme? The Viral Reaction Image And Its Curious Origin Explained

For several years, a certain monkey puppet has been very prevalent all around the internet, with the reaction image known as "Awkward Look Monkey Puppet" seeing continued usage ever since it first started being posted nearly a decade ago.

You might be wondering, however, where this adorable little guy came from, as he is noticeably not of the Sesame Street variety of puppet and he doesn't match any of Kermit The Frog's aesthetics. Never fear, however, for we've tracked down the origins of Kento, the Japanese monkey puppet.

Here's the story behind the Awkward Look Monkey Puppet meme and how it's still used online to this day.

Where Does 'Awkward Look Monkey Puppet' Come From And How Did It Become A Meme?

Kento, also known as Pedro in the Spanish dub that came out decades later, is a character that comes from the children's series Ōkiku naru Ko, which began airing in Japan in 1959, four years after Kermit the Frog hit airwaves.

Three decades later, the show started to be broadcast in Latin America with a Spanish dub, and close to six decades after its initial run, high-quality photoshopped images of it began to be posted on Facebook.

Back in July 2021, Know Your Meme spoke to Peru-based musician and content creator Dani Flores, the creator of Awkward Look Monkey Puppet, in an interview where he told us he created the image after making a series of edits to the original:

It was my third cartoon that gave birth to Awkward Look Monkey Puppet. In this vignette, I wanted to represent a person who was discovered by his "crush" while he was watching. But when designing it, I realized that the fact that the character turned his face was not enough to be funny, it was necessary for the character to return the view "secretly," because it is a very human action with which we identify. That's what makes it funny, that was the "punchline" that turned it into a joke. Because we all know that that "hidden" look ends up giving us away even more, and in the monkey, with his neutral puppet face, it was even funnier.

But there was a slight drawback, and that is that the monkey, as a puppet, only looked straight ahead, so what I did was just go to Photoshop and edit the eyes. A simple edit, duplicating the layer, erasing the eyes with the clone stamp and redrawing them with a brush.

With the cartoon finished on May 5th, 2016, I published it that same day in a group at my university called "Which professor from la Ulima should I enroll with?" and quickly exploded into likes. The rest is history.

What Does 'Awkward Look Monkey Puppet' Mean?

Over the years, it's kept a similar meaning throughout its time online, which is usually of someone pretending that they do not notice a situation that is happening next to them or simply reacting awkwardly to an above caption. Many of its early usages were similar to POV memes in which the goal was to put yourself in the place of the monkey puppet.

What Other Memes Use 'Awkward Look Monkey Puppet'?

Shortly after becoming popularized for the awkward look expressed in the format, the same monkey puppet started to gain attention because of its surprised expression. This expression, often shown through either a GIF or a series of two pictures to show the change in expression, became used online to show when someone is either genuinely surprised at something or given the known context of the monkey puppet, used to feign surprise in a sarcastic tone.

For the full history of Awkward Monkey Puppet, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's entry for even more information.