Carter the Banana Boy

Confirmed 166,612

About

Carter the Banana Boy is a photoshop meme based on a picture of a young boy in sunglasses and looking at the camera while eating a banana. In this series, an exploitable cutout of the boy is photoshopped into a variety of base images to portray him as the star of an action film, in somewhat similar vein to The Action Movie Kid.

Origin

On May 12th, 2014, Redditor Theone211 submitted a photograph of a little boy eating a banana in a post titled "This is Carter. He knocked on my door to ask if he could have a banana then left" to the /r/funny^[1] subreddit (shown below). In the first 24 hours, the post gained over 73,100 upvotes and 2,600 comments.

In the comments section, Redditor FuriousGeorge06 suggested someone should "photoshop an explosion behind him," which was promptly followed up by a set of three "explosive" photoshopped parodies from Redditor Saurongetti, along with a blank template of the boy eating the banana (shown below, far right).

Spread

That same day, Reddit sodelll posted an image macro of the photo with the caption "I'm here to fuck bitches and eat bananas / and I'm almost done with my banana" to /r/funny^[2] (shown below, left). Meanwhile, Redditor dayofgreed submitted the picture of Carter to the /r/photoshopbattles^[3] subreddit, where several Redditors posted images with Carter superimposed into the backgrounds of film posters (shown below, right).

Also on May 12th, 2014, other photoshopped images featuring Carter reached the front page of Reddit,^[4]^[5]^[6] many of which earned upwards of 10,000 upvotes in 24 hours (shown below). Later that day, compilations of notable examples were subsequently posted on BuzzFeed^[7] and Mashable.^[8]

On May 13th, actor Wil Wheaton tweeted that Carter was his "favorite person on the Internet today," receiving over 240 favorites and 85 retweets in less than 12 hours.