Crying Boston Terrier

About

Crying Boston Terrier, also known as Sniffling and Crying Dog or Sad Boston Terrier, refers to a viral video from TikTok in which a brown dog of the Boston Terrier breed is seen sniffling and sniveling on a couch with watery eyes while "Nothing Compares 2 U" by Sinéad O'Connor starts to play in the background. The TikTok of the dog crying quickly started to spread across the site in the early 2020s, with it being edited into different backgrounds as an exploitable meme for added context or having text used to create a punchline.

Origin

The earliest post featuring the dog was uploaded to TikTok on November 4th, 2021, by TikToker rteelek001^[1]. In the clip, the dog can be seen sitting on a red-and-white checkered couch while the beginning of the song begins to play. This version, having captions on it, would suggest it is not the exact first use for it, but it is the earliest known remaining example (shown below).

Spread

Over the following years, the dog would receive usage as a meme with different types of context added to it via captions. On November 25th, 2022, the TikToker tooloudcanthear^[2] uploaded a TikTok of the dog to the platform, adding on a caption in which the dog is showing the emotion associated with being emotionally abused and threatened by your mother (shown below).

In early 2023, the crying Boston Terrier started to be used in different types of backgrounds, spurred on by a green screen template being created and spread across the website. In this new usage of the dog, it would retain its characteristics as a dog, but instead showed different reasons for it to be crying. For example, on March 20th, 2024, TikToker MillerChris307^[3] posted a meme using the format in which the dog is crying because the owner went to the bathroom without them (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References