I'm Shifting Into Soup Mode

Submission 34,567

Part of a series on Seinfeld. [View Related Entries]

About

I'm Shifting Into Soup Mode is an image macro of George Costanza (played by Jason Alexander) from Seinfeld captioned, "I gotta focus. I'm shifting into soup mode." The scene comes from the famous 1996 episode "The Soup Nazi" and started to see use in memes as an exploitable format in 2016, often with jokes about the season changing from hot to cold. The image and phrase are often used as a phrasal template by recaptioning the text with variations of "I'm Shifting Into X Mode."

Origin

On November 2nd, 1996, episode 116 of Seinfeld, "The Soup Nazi," aired. At one point in the episode, George Constanza lines up to get soup. He says to Elaine, "I gotta focus. I'm shifting into soup mode." The scene was captioned as an image macro as early as February 8th, 2014, when Instagram^[1] user seinfelddaily posted it, garnering over 1,600 likes in eight years (shown below, left). On November 15th, 2016, Instagram^[2] user costanzagrams posted the meme with an additional caption, reading, "When it's starting to feel like winter," garnering over 7,900 likes in six years (shown below, right).

Spread

On October 4th, 2017, Instagram^[3] user costanzagrams posted another version of the meme, garnering over 15,000 likes in five years. On February 27th, 2019, the meme was added to Seinfeldmemes.com.^[4] That year the meme began to increase in popularity. On October 1st, Instagram^[5] user spookyhoagie posted a Halloween edit of the meme replacing "soup" with "spooky," garnering over 3,000 likes in three years (shown below).

On May 30th, 2021, iFunny^[6] user Trad_Hates_Modernism posted a version of the meme tinted red, replacing "soup" with "evil," garnering over 5,900 smiles in a year (shown below, left). On September 2nd, actress Kat Dennings posted the original image macro to Instagram,^[7] garnering over 58,500 likes in a year. On November 2nd, the world.of.bongs Instagram^[8] and Facebook^[9] pages posted a version of the meme about taking dabs, garnering over 8,900 likes on the former and 1,800 reactions and 16,000 shares on the latter in 10 months (shown below, right).

On August 30th, 2022, Twitter^[10] user @joshcarlosjosh posted the image macro, writing, "when I see that September starts this week," garnering over 108,000 likes and 17,000 retweets in a week (shown below). The meme was reposted to the 9GAG Instagram^[11] page on September 2nd, garnering over 102,000 likes in a week.