Honey Bun Baby

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About

Honey Bun Baby, also known as Ashton J., is the popular name given to Ashton Howell, a 22-month old boy from Alabama whose photos were popularly circulated on Twitter and particularly Black Twitter as reaction images.

Origin

According to AL.com,^[1] Howell first appeared on the Instagram account of his 18-year old uncle, Steven Small, which is unidentified. The first known posted picture of Howell came on Twitter on November 21st, 2016 from @JellaYonce,^[2] who posted what would become the most famous Honey Bun Baby picture in response to news that Kanye West had cancelled his Saint Pablo Tour.

Spread

In the coming days, more pictures of Howell began circulating through Black Twitter, as people began using his face for reaction images to captions related to relationships and Thanksgiving. Some Twitter users joked about a rivalry between Honey Bun Baby and Gavin, another child who achieved internet fame via his uncle. One such post by YouTuber Nathan Zed,^[5] shown below, has gained 22,800 retweets and 44,324 favorites as of December 2nd, 2016.

On November 26th, an Instagram account devoted to crowdsourced Honey Bun Baby memes, officialashtonj,^[3] was created. It has nearly 1,700 followers as of December 2nd, 2016.

The following day, singer and actor Tyrese posted the photo to his Instagram account^[4] with the caption "When she keeps calling after you hang up in here face….. Cause she wants to keep arguing about the same bullshit -" in a post that gained over 34,700 likes. On November 28th, popular hip-hop artist Chance the Rapper posted a picture of Honey Bun Baby to his Twitter account^[6] to celebrate his award for Best New Artist at the Soul Train Awards and Hip Hop Awards. The tweet gained over 2,600 retweets and 13,000 likes.

Honey Bun Baby then began attracting media attention; on November 29th, the spread of Honey Bun Baby pictures was covered by The Daily Dot.^[7] The following day, AL.com,^[1] a website for Alabama-related news, interviewed Honey Bun Baby's mother, Ariel Griggs, who cautiously embraced her son's viral fame, but did not appreciate some of the more "X-rated" examples of the meme. The following day, The Fader^[8] covered AL's Griggs interview.