Annoying Childhood Friend

Confirmed 355,038

Part of a series on Advice Animals. [View Related Entries]

About

Annoying Childhood Friend is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photo of a young boy in a white polo shirt smiling at the camera. Like a younger version of Scumbag Steve, the captions typically portray the character as an inconsiderate host, a demanding guest or an obnoxious playmate.

Origin

On February 16th, 2009, the original photo of the boy (shown below, left) was uploaded by Flickr^[1] user fordesman with the caption "Quite an annoying kid…." Nearly two and a half years later, on August 3rd, 2011, Redditor brobice submitted the first image macro instance of the series to /r/pics^[2] in a post titled "We all knew this kid" with the caption "Let me tryyyy / I'm the guest" (shown below, right). Prior to being archived, the post received 3968 up votes and 344 comments.

Spread

On August 17th, 2011, another image macro featuring a caption nearly identical to the original Reddit instance was submitted to Quickmeme.^[4] The following day, several examples were posted on the Internet humor site The Bigster.^[11] On August 22nd, a compilation of derivatives was posted to the viral content site BuzzFeed.^[3]

The same day, the web culture blog Uproxx^[5] published an article titled "Meme Watch: Annoying Childhood Friend Will Probably Find You on Facebook, If He Hasn't Already", in which the author compared the advice animal character to the obnoxious neighborhood children from his childhood. On August 25th, Smosh^[15] featured a series of instances of the meme. Additionally, an "Annoying Childhood Friend" Facebook page was created, which has gained approximately 100 likes as of January 2013. That November, Pleated Jeans^[14] shared a "best-of" compilation of the meme. On March 9th, 2012, an "Annoying Childhood Friend Song" video was published on the Internet humor site College Humor^[12], which featured lyrics inspired by image macro captions from the series. That July, another series of instances was shared on humor site Runt of the Web.^[13]

Notable Examples

As of January 2013, the Annoying Childhood Friend has more than 1500 submissions on Quickmeme.^[4] Additional instances continue to appear on Memebase^[6], FunnyJunk^[7], Tumblr^[8], and the AdviceAnimals subreddit.^[9] Recurring motifs in the series include the character's tendency to cheat when playing games or threatening to snitch on a friend.