Donkey Reaching for Waffles
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About
Donkey Reaching for Waffles or Donkey Eating Waffle is a clip from the 2010 animated film Shrek Forever After in which the character Donkey is reaching for waffles with his tongue out while Shrek is trying to stop him. Starting in 2021, the clip was used as source material for video and GIF captions, most notably for Lunging for the Officer's Gun memes.
Origin
On May 21st, 2010, the animated comedy film Shrek Forever After premiered.[1] In one scene of the film, the character Donkey (played by Eddie Murphy) stumbles upon a stack of waffles in a forest clearing. Donkey then shortly hesitates as Shrek makes a point that the waffles could be a trap, slowly reaching for them with his tongue while Shrek talks (scene shown below).
Prior to June 1st, 2021, an unknown user captioned the GIF with a joke about Waffle House restaurants (shown below). On June 1st, iFunny[2][3] users FAIR and Spectral_anomaly both reposted the meme, gaining 13 and 36 smiles in two years, respectively.
Spread
In the following months, the meme was widely circulated through reposts on Instagram and other platforms.
On November 10th, 2021, iFunny[4] user rotinheal posted the earliest derivative version of the meme, captioning the GIF, "Calmly reaching for my cyanide pill as a police officer fines me $50 for a parking ticket." The post (shown below, left) gained over 34,900 smiles in one year. On December 31st, 2021, iFunny[5] user PEANUTBUTTERPERSON posted a remake of the original joke, with the post gaining over 20,500 smiles in one year (shown below, right).
Through 2022 and 2023, the caption format saw further spread online on TikTok, Twitter, Reddit and other sites. For example, on January 2nd, 2022, Redditor The_Sad_Memer posted a meme that received over 5,700 upvotes in the /r/shitposting[6] subreddit in a year (shown below, left). On February 12th, 2023, Redditor allouttacreamcheese posted a meme that received over 550 upvotes in /r/whenthe[7] one month (shown below, right).
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1] YouTube – DreamWorks' 'Shrek Forever After' Clip – Waffles in the Forest
[3] iFunny – Spectral_anomaly
[5] iFunny – PEANUTBUTTERPERSON
[6] Reddit – You won't get a word out of me
[7] Reddit – I'm Thristy
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