I Feel Bad For You / I Don't Think About You At All

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About

I Feel Bad For You / I Don't Think About You At All is a dialog exchange from the American TV drama Mad Men between Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) and Michael Ginsberg (played by Ben Feldman). The scene and quotes grew prominent on the internet during the 2010s, making them the subject of various object-labeling, exploitable, fan art and parody memes.

Origin

The scene, which is from the ninth episode of season five of Mad Men, titled "Dark Shadows," aired on May 13th, 2012.^[1] In the scene, Ginsberg confronts Draper in an elevator, questioning Draper's decision of going with his idea for an advertisement instead of one of his own. While keeping his composure, Draper dismisses Ginsberg's "I feel bad for you" with "I don't think about you at all" and leaves. The scene was uploaded to YouTube by Mari natin on August 17th, 2012, and received over 1.3 million views and 8,900 likes in 9 years (shown below).^[2]

Spread

The scene became famous as a meme format and was spread on various websites, such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, 4chan and many others.^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10] On May 3rd, 2020, Redditor TopEggIF posted a meme of the scene, substituting Ginsberg and Draper with Karl Marx and Max Stirner. The post received over 20 points in 1 year^[11] (shown below, left). On July 27th, 2021, the American State of New Jersey's Twitter account posted a meme referencing the scene on National New Jersey Day, which garnered over 22,300 likes and 4,200 retweets in six months^[12] (shown below, right).

On February 18th, 2018, a Valentine’s Day E-card was posted on /r/madmen by user Spiffyfunpants, which received over 730 upvotes in three years (shown below, left).^[13] A similar one was posted on February 14th, 2020, with other Mad Men E-cards by Twitter account @MadMenQts (Mad Men Quotes), receiving over 625 likes in 10 months (shown below, right).^[14]

The meme format gained popularity on imageboards, particularly on 4chan, and was often used by American users as a response to European and other non-American posters (examples shown below).^[15]^[16]^[17]^[18]