I'm Not Ashamed of My Body / History

About

I'm Not Ashamed of My Body and I'm Not Ashamed of My History is an exploitable image macro meme using a scene from Seinfeld in which an overweight, naked man on the subway tells Jerry, "I'm not ashamed of my body," to which Jerry responds, "Exactly, that's the problem. You should be." The meme was first popularized on Reddit in 2019 and became increasingly prevalent as an object-labeling format in 2020 when the large man's caption was edited to read, "I'm not ashamed of my history," with the man and Jerry each labeled with flags or imagery associated with certain countries.

Origin

On April 28th, 2019, Redditor u/krispieswik posted a meme to /r/dankmemes^[1] using images from the 1992 Seinfeld episode "Subway" in which a naked man on the subway says to Jerry, "I'm not ashamed of my body" and Seinfeld insists, "That's the problem. You should be."^[2] In the meme, the naked man is labeled "Obese people online" and Seinfeld is labeled "Medical professionals." The post gained over 28,500 upvotes in five years (shown below).

Spread

The meme spread over the following years. On October 9th, 2020, Redditor u/Barack_Lesnar posted a version of the meme to /r/PoliticalCompassMemes,^[3] garnering over 4,000 upvotes in four years. On the same day, Redditor u/MrFerry20 posted a version of the meme to /r/PoliticalHumor^[4] replacing the naked man's caption with "I'm not ashamed of my history" and assigning flags to each person, garnering over 400 upvotes in four years (shown below).

The "I'm not ashamed of my history" version of the meme became the dominant version of the meme going forward. On November 1st, 2020, u/SicarioCercops posted a new version of the meme to /r/dankmemes,^[5] garnering over 30,000 upvotes in four years (shown below, left). On February 17th, 2021, iFunny^[6] user cybernaut316 posted a Star Wars meme referencing the original scene, garnering over 49,000 smiles in three years (shown below, right).

On February 13th, 2024, X^[7] user @JoshEakle posted a version of the meme in which the naked man is labeled as France, garnering over 22,000 likes in 10 days (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References