All of You, Get Out! Except You, You Stay

Submission 8,474

Part of a series on SpongeBob SquarePants. [View Related Entries]

About

All of You, Get Out! Except You, You Stay refers to an exploitable image macro series based on a scene from SpongeBob Squarepants where Mr. Krabs fires a group of employees, with the exception of a clown, telling the clown, "except you, you can stay." The scene first aired in the March 2002 episode "As Seen On TV" and was first used as a meme in 2015, becoming increasingly used as a template to illustrate similar situations where a single item or person escaped a collective bad fate over the following years.

Origin

On March 8th, 2002, SpongeBob SquarePants season 3 episode 47 aired in the U.S. In one scene, in order to cut the budge of a commercial for the Krusty Krab, Mr. Krabs tells all hired employees to go away. As a clown begins to leave, Mr. Krabs changes his mind, saying to the clown, "except you, you stay," resulting in joy from the clow. The oldest online recording of this scene was uploaded on YouTube^[1] on April 17th, 2015 (shown below).

"All right, get lost, all of ya. You're fired. Go on. Scram. Get out of here, you moochers. That's right, keep moving… Except you. You stay." *honking noises*

The oldest available meme to use the scene was posted by Know Your Meme^[2] user Mimikyu on October 2nd, 2015 and referenced Super Smash Bros. An original source for the meme was not provided.

Spread

On December 20th, 2016, Tumblr^[3] user krabby-kronicle posted a version of the meme that criticizes Nickelodeon's perceived favoritism towards Spongebob Squarepants over their other cartoon licenses, garnering over 60,000 notes in seven years (shown below).

On November 29th, 2020, Instagram^[4] user minecraftmemes.ig posted a simplified two-panel version of the meme referencing Minecraft, garnering over 16,900 likes in three years (shown below, left). On September 3rd, 2021, Instagram^[5] user mehmeh.69 posted a version of the meme referencing the popularity of the Moai Emoji, garnering over 21,000 likes in two years (shown below, right).

On January 5th, 2023, a Redditor posted a version of the meme to /r/MemeTemplatesOfficial^[6] about peoples' perceptions towards the rich featuring MrBeast and Elon Musk, garnering over 3,000 upvotes in 10 months. On January 10th, u/Yellogre posted a version of the meme to /r/dankmemes,^[7] garnering over 51,000 upvotes in the same span of time (shown below).