"Eleanor Rigby" Parodies

About

"Eleanor Rigby" Parodies refer to social media posts written in a way that invites readers to read the words to the tune of the popular Beatles song, "Eleanor Rigby." They're primarily popular on Twitter, where the parodies are often about current trends or memes.

Origin

"Eleanor Rigby" is the second track off the Beatles album Revolver. It was released as a single on August 5th, 1966^[1] (shown below).

Parodies of the song will often follow the meter of the song's verse, which reads:

Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream

Twitter users began writing parodies of the track in the early 2010s. One of the earliest extant examples is a February 14th, 2010 post by @reyar, who wrote, "all the lonely hipsters, where do they all come from? i look at all the lonely hipsters."^[2]

Spread

The parodies began to grow more popular in 2016 thanks in part to the tweets of @KestrelPi, who tweeted a series of popular examples in 2015 and 2016. His most popular example read:

To the tune of Eleanor Rigby:
Dog in a trenchcoat
Getting promoted at work but then sheds his disguise
Canine surprise

The October 27th, 2016 post gained over 23,000 retweets and 47,000 likes (shown below, left). The following day, he had another popular example about Danny DeVito trying to produce a sequel to Twins, gaining over 560 retweets and 1,300 likes (shown below, right). The users tweets were covered by The Poke.^[3]

More recently, on November 3rd, 2019, Twitter user @mnurkic gained over 1,900 retweets and 17,000 likes making an Epstein Didn't Kill Himself joke (shown below, left). @arrrroberts gained over 70 retweets and 300 likes on October 6th, 2019 joking about the character Hannibal Lecter (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References