Humblebrag

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About

Humblebrag is a term referring to the act of making a self-deprecating statement with the actual purpose of drawing attention to a trait of which one is proud. The term gained popularity in 2010, after the creation of a novelty twitter account dedicated to retweeting humblebrags was created.

Origin

The term Humblebrag first appeared as part of a novelty twitter account^[1] created by late comedian Harris Wittels^[2] in November 2010. The account was dedicated to retweeting other tweets which Wittels saw as Humblebrags, beginning with a tweet by actor and comedian Matt Braunger, referring to a day of shooting with the more popular actor Bryan Cranston (shown below).

About creating the term, Wittels told the Wall Street Journal:

"It was originally something I would just silently stew over. Then it became something I would joke around about. Then I was like, OK I'm just gonna do it. I was really worried about people getting mad about it, and I almost shut down the account on the first night. But, people have been really good sports about it, at least to my face. There's also a chance I am widely hated.^[3]

On September 25th, 2012, Wittels published a book called Humblebrag: The Art of False Modesty.

Spread

The hashtag gained popularity on Twitter as the Twitter account grew in popularity. The term was first defined on Urban Dictionary on February 24th, 2011 as "A form self promotion where the promoter thinks he is, almost subliminally, bragging about himself in the context of a humble statement or complaint. Everyone listening thinks he a jackass."

Between June 27th, 2011 and October 10th, 2012, Wittels wrote a column about Humblebrags for the popular web magazine Grantland.^[4] The subreddit /r/humblebrag was founded on July 11th, 2011 and as of June 2nd, 2015 it had 8,229 readers.^[5]

The Twitter account continued to run until March 1st 2013, when the account finished updating. Wittels died a year later. As of June 2015, the dormant account has over 248,000 followers, and the hashtag continues to be used between 100,000 and 200,000 times per day on Twitter.