Insanity Crow

Submission 47,215

About

Insanity Crow is an image macro series featuring a photograph of a black crow with an intimidating-looking upturned beak. The captions portray the bird as devious, threatening and maniacal, bearing many similarities to the Evil Cows advice animal series.

Origin

On October 15th, 2012, Redditor Glibhat submitted a post to the /r/funny^[1] subreddit titled "I took this picture of a crow yesterday," featuring a photograph of a black crow with a prominent upturned beak (shown below, left). Within 24 hours, the post received over 23,500 up votes and 700 comments. Redditor CyaSteve replied to the post with a three-pane comic, characterizing the crow as a stereotypical Internet tough guy (shown below, right).

Precursors

The series bear many similarities in theme and composition to a number of animal image macro and advice animal memes, most notably Evil Cows, Soon and Insanity Puppy (shown below, left). Meanwhile, the multi-pane format juxtaposing the animal's ordinary facial expression with a startled looking one has been seen on Reddit in a /r/funny post^[9] (shown center) submitted by Redditor andybybee on May 13th, 2012 and another post titled "This is how I imagine people that make violence (sic) threats from behind the computer"^[6] (shown below, right)by Redditor Groznyylol on August 15th.

Spread

On October 15th, 2012, Redditor iamwhatiis submitted an image macro of his crow photograph in a post titled “Insanity Crow”^[3] (shown below, left). Within 24 hours, the post received more than 15,000 up votes and 185 comments. The same day, Redditor Praxxus submitted an image macro titled “Insanity Crow Predicts Your Future,”^[4] which received over 13,200 up votes and 175 comments within the first 24 hours (shown below right).

Also on October 15th, 9gag^[7] user grayfront submitted Redditor iamwhatiis' image macro in a post titled "Insanity Crow," receiving over 16,000 up votes and 5,300 Facebook shares within the first 24 hours. On the following day, FunnyJunk^[8] user pappalardi re-submitted Redditor Praxxus' image macro to the Internet humor site.