Bravo Vince

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About

Bravo Vince is a sarcastic comment and a circlejerk meme popular among fans of the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul crime drama series that parodies excessive praise for the shows' creator, writer and director Vince Gilligan, his attention to detail, and his frequent employment of foreshadowing and cinematic parallels. The memes often rely on praising Gilligan for parallels that are so forced and overly elaborate that they are definitely unintentional.

Origin

The trend of sarcastically commenting "Bravo Vince" to pretend to praise Breaking Bad creator, writer, director and showrunner Vince Gilligan started on 4chan's /tv/ board in 2012. As Gilligan achieved a reputation of a great writer who often employs foreshadowing and cinematic parallels, the sarcastic comment was used to mock the excessive praise for him, and has often been used in combination with forced, overly elaborate parallels as if they were intentional.

The earliest archived "bravo vince" comment was made on March 11th, 2012, in a /tv/^[1] thread about the 2008 film Hancock, co-written by Gilligan.

The meme was started on April 13th, 2012, when 4chan user writing under the name Mazi !HeHERJIZoI made two comments in a /tv/^[2]^[3] thread in which he used the phrase to ironically praise Gilligan over actually killing people for death scenes (shown below, left and right).

Spread

Over the Summer of 2012, the comment achieved viral popularity on the 4chan's /tv/ board. For example, on July 13th, 2012, a 4chan^[4] user posted a mockup of a 100 Metacritic score for the yet-to-be-premiered Season five of the show, commenting, "bravo vince" (shown below, left). On July 16th, following the premiere, a user commented^[5] "bravo vince" on one of the scenes from the first episode (shown below, center). On August 13th, 2012, a /tv/ user posted^[6] a forced parallel with the 1995 film Heat, using the comment as a sarcastic punchline (shown below, right).

On August 26th, a 4chan user posted three deliberately nonsensical theories about Breaking Bad characters accompanied with the phrase (shown below).^[7]^[8]^[9]

The comment maintained viral popularity on 4chan among the Breaking Bad fanbase on the /tv/ board, regaining popularity in 2015 following Breaking Bad's sequel Better Call Saul premiere.

From 4chan, the comment spread to Reddit's /r/breakingbad, /r/betterCallSaul and /r/okbuddychicanery subreddits (examples of use shown below).

The meme achieved major recognition in Summer 2022 at the time of the Better Call Saul season six premire as the cultural significance and meme recognition of Better Call Saul spiked.