If You Know What I Mean

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Part of a series on Mr. Bean. [View Related Entries]

About

"If You Know What I Mean" is a rage comic character based on a still frame of actor Rowan Atkinson portraying the fictional character Mr. Bean. It is used to point out a double entendre in a post or image macro, commonly in the form of sexual innuendo. Although originally created as a rage face, the character is also used in vertical comics in a similar manner to the You Don't Say? and We've Got a Badass Over Here reaction images.

Origin

The first instance of the rage character was submitted by 9gag^[1] user aldik101 in a post titled "Let's watch a movie, if you know what I mean" on January 28th, 2012, featuring a screen capture of Rowan Atkinson from the 2007 comedy film Mr. Bean's Holiday (shown below, left). As of November 7th 2012, the post accumulated over 43,000 likes, 3,300 Facebook shares and 240 comments. The same day, an extended version of aldik101's comic was posted by 9gag^[2] user elyo11, who added a vectorized version of Atkinson's expression along with the caption "If you know what I mean" (shown below, right).

Colloquial Usage

The phrase “if you know what I mean” has been colloquially used to point out a sexual double entendre for many years prior to the creation of the Mr. Bean rage face. On August 1st, 2003, Urban Dictionary^[19] user Tommy Harkness submitted an entry for the phrase, defining it as a “way to make a statement ‘dirty’.” TV Tropes^[20] also includes the phrase as part of the "Lampshaded Double Entendre"^[20] trope, describing it as "a remark to ensure that the audience spots the hidden meaning," similar to "That's What She Said."

Spread

On January 29th, 2012, a template of the rage face was posted on the Internet humor site Meme-O-Rama.^[6] On January 31st, FunnyJunk^[3] user potatoos submitted a vertical comic using the rage face to the Internet humor site. On February 1st, 9gag^[9] user iv4eto_19_95 submitted a post titled "If you know what I mean," which included a poem accompanied by the Mr. Bean rage face (shown below). Within nine months, the post received over 56,900 up votes and 7,200 Facebook shares.

On February 23rd, the Internet humor site Smosh^[8] published a post titled “Best Of The ‘If You Know What I Mean’ Face!”,^[8] featuring notable examples from the series. As of November 7th, 2012, a Facebook page^[17] titled "If You Know What I Mean" has accumulated over 73,000 likes.

Notable Examples

Additional examples can be found on FunnyJunk,^[10] 9gag,^[11] MemeCenter,^[12] MemeBase^[21] and the f7u12 subreddit.^[13] Advice Animal templates using the image can be found on Quickmeme,^[14]^[15] MemeGenerator^[18] and Zipmeme.^[16]