About

Burst Into Treats is a bait-and-switch copypasta commonly used on 4chan imageboards to conclude a seemingly believable greentext story about a personal experience involving embarrassing or emotionally moving moments. Similar to Spaghetti Stories and Fucking Gamestop, the readers only become aware of the anticlimactic joke toward the end of each story.

Origin

On June 22nd, 2010, a greentext story thread titled "Greentext When You Felt Like a Dick"^[1] was posted on 4chan's /r9k/ board, a miscellaneous board based on a bot made for the webcomic xkcd's IRC channel. One user replied to the thread with a story about a fight with his or her mother on the graduation day.

It is likely that the original poster meant to type “burst into tears,” but seemed to never reappear in the thread. Within five minutes of that post, other users in the thread called attention to the typo and incorporated the line into their own stories.

Spread

Three days later, an AskReddit^[2] thread appeared asking for stories about causing someone to burst into treats. It has also been used in Yahoo! Answers^[8] questions, paired with references to other greentext tropes, like spaghetti stories and penis inspection day.

The phrase has since spread to other 4chan boards, including /v/ (video games)^[4], /b/ (random)^[5] and /tv/ (television)^[6], where the joke is typically played out in the form of green text stories^[7], as well as on Tumblr^[9], where there are cartoons and illustrations based on the original story.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search for "burst in treats" began in July 2010 with search peaks in November 2010 and April 2011 before reaching an all time high in October 2011.

External References