Can You Talk Like A Normal Person?

Submission 9,485

Part of a series on Exploitables. [View Related Entries]

About

Can You Talk Like A Normal Person? refers to an exploitable webcomic by Bright Side about dating a sarcastic person, showing a woman asking, "Can't you talk like a normal person?" to her significant other and him thinking, "sarcastic reply" and "normal reply" in two separate thought bubbles. The comic became the subject of edits in 2021 where people photoshop the words in the thought bubbles with meme references, particularly references to Internet slang terms, ironic memes and catchphrases.

Origin

On May 19th, 2017, Brightside.me^[1] posted a collection of 10 original comics about dating a sarcastic person, titled, "10 Comic Strips Showing That Dating Sarcastic People Is a Lot of Fun." The 10th comic shows a woman asking her significant other, "Can you talk like a normal person?" and him thinking, "sarcastic reply" and "normal reply" (shown below).

Spread

In 2021, the webcomic became the subject of photoshops. On February 23rd, 2021, Redditor christopher_schroede posted the earliest known edit of the comic to /r/cursedmeme,^[2] replacing the man's thought bubble text with "sus" and "yell racial slurs" (shown below). The meme was reposted by Instagram^[3] user officialnick.tv on March 19th, gaining over 8,400 likes in a year.

On July 14th, Instagram^[4] user godswiener posted a version of the comic replacing the bubbles with "sus" and "I forgor💀", gaining over 23,000 likes in 11 months (shown below, left). On the same day, Twitter^[5] user @PizzaPenguin_ posted a version of the meme replacing the text with "Poggers" and "so true bestie," gaining over 128,000 likes and 14,000 retweets in the same span of time (shown below, right).

On September 27th, iFunny^[6] user Analucifer posted a version of the meme referencing the Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? meme, (shown below). On October 3rd, Instagram^[7] user lufffffyy reposted the meme, gaining over 26,000 likes in eight months. On June 8th, 2022, Twitter^[8] user @TheOmniLiberal posted a version of the comic referencing sus and amogus, gaining over 7,600 likes in under a day.