About

Confused Private is an image macro depicting the penguin named Private from the 2014 Penguins of Madagascar movie. The image is a still taken from the film showing the character, Private, having a thousand-yard stare ahead of him, completely unaware of what is going on as he looks confused. This image is used as both a reaction image, conveying a lack of understanding, and as an image macro with text captions photoshopped on top to create a meme.

Origin

The first usage of Private in this context was in the /r/dankmemes^[1] subreddit by Redditor /u/canihabekosovopls, who posted it on February 9th, 2017, receiving 15,600 upvotes and 102 comments in six months. This meme was used as part of the When Your Girlfriend Has A Twin Sister format and was the only use of this image template for several years (shown below).

Spread

The image of Private staring to the side with another overlaid image of himself was posted to the subreddit /r/MemeTemplatesOfficial^[2] by Redditor Meemsouprice on August 19th, 2019. This version^[2] became a template for a sub-type of the meme in the following years depicting Private having an out-of-body, disassociating reaction (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References