Get A Load Of This Guy

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About

"Get a Load of This Guy" is an idiomatic expression that can either be used to acknowledge a witty remark made by another person or poke fun at the complacency of such a remark. In online discussion forums and comments, the phrase is most often iterated in the form of reaction images in which various characters are making a pointing gesture.

Origin

On May 3rd, 2007, an entry^[5] for the phrase was submitted to Urban Dictionary, defining it as:

[a] phrase to describe someone who thinks he/she has a lot of clams, and is therefore exceptionally witty, jaunty, and/or extravagant

One of the earliest and most widely used base photographs for the reaction image series originates from a scene in the 1992 American comedy film Wayne's World^[4], wherein the titular character Wayne Campbell looks directly at the camera while gesturing his thumb towards his friend Garth Algar in a fit of laughter and the subtitle reads "Get-A-Load-of-This-Guy."

Spread

Since as early as 2010, the screen capture of the scene (pictured below) has been used as a reaction image on various image boards, with the earliest known archived instance dating back to a 4chan thread^[1] posted on August 17th, 2010.

In the following years, a number of other derivatives entered widespread usage on 4chan. On January 12th, 2011, an image macro of Patrick Bateman, better known as the Dubs Guy) from the 2000 American black comedy film American Psycho (shown below, left), was posted in a discussion thread^[4] on /a/ (anime) board. On March 31st, another iteration based on an image of Ross Geller, one of the main characters from the 90s American TV sitcom Friends, was posted in a thread^[3] on /a/ (anime) board (pictured below, right).

In addition, the expression has been also used as the title of dozens of posts on Reddit^[8] and #get a load of this guy remains an active hashtag on Tumblr.^[6]