Futurama Zoidberg / Why Not Zoidberg?

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About

Futurama Zoidberg, also known as "Why not Zoidberg?", is an advice animal image macro series featuring the cephalopod-like alien Zoidberg from the cartoon TV series Futurama. Captions typically start with a query of some sort, followed by the rhetorical question "why not Zoidberg?" at the bottom.

Origin

Doctor John A. Zoidberg is a fictional character for the Futurama television series. He is an alien that appears like a mix between a lobster and an octopus, and serves as a doctor despite his poor understanding of human physiology.^[1] A "Futurama Zoidberg"^[2] Quickmeme page was created on July 5th, 2011. The first submission was captioned with "You call that an ink defense? Blughidihlgidgldgdd…"^[10] The same day Redditor mrrabbitfluff posted a thread titled "Zoidberg offers himself"^[3] that linked to a Quickmeme submission with the text "Need a new meme? Why not Zoidberg?" The post reached the front page and has received 6,665 up votes as of September 23rd, 2011.

Rhetoric Device

According to Wikipedia^[12], "why not" is sometimes used to ask rhetorical questions that "bring an end to a debate or to finalize a decision." On March 16th, 2011, a thread questioning Zoidberg's rhetorical use of the phrase "why not" was submitted to the Peelified^[11] Futurama forum. Other users responded addressing the speculation that the phrase was inspired by Yiddish stereotypes.

Spread

Emoticons for Zoidberg were popularized when Redditor SmashBoomPower posted a thread titled "In need of a new emoticon?"^[8] featuring an image macro with the emoticon "(V)(°,,°)(V)" on September 20th, 2011. The thread was linked on The Daily What^[9] on September 23rd, and several variations of the emoticon popped up afterwards.

Several pages of fan art can be found on the art sharing website deviantArt^[14] under the tag "#why not zoidberg." The meme has since spread to other sites including Memebase^[4], Tumblr^[5], FunnyJunk^[6] and Reddit.^[7] The Quickmeme page has accumulated over 3,300 submissions and a Facebook page has 960 likes as of February 8th, 2012.