Large Adult Sons

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About

Large Adult Sons refers to characters that originated in Weird Twitter jokes. They are generally characterized as full-grown young men with childish qualities who tend to be an annoyance for the poster. Notably, the term has been applied to the sons of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and president Donald Trump.

Origin

The characters began appearing in Weird Twitter posts around 2012. The New Yorker^[1] wrote the trend began with since-deleted Twitter user @MuscularSon, who would tweet things like "i cant control my enormous nerd sons. they force me to cosplay as a police box from Dr Who and take turns paintballing my enormous nude torso." The trend was spread further by Dril, who utilized similar characters. On November 15th, 2013,^[2] he tweeted "i have trained my two fat identical sons to sit outside of my office and protect my brain from mindfreaks by meditating intensely."

Spread

On November 20th, 2014, Clickhole posted a satirical quiz article called "Which One Of My Garbage Sons Are You?"^[3] which used the absurdist tropes found in earlier Large Adult Sons tweets. Its intro reads "My huge beautiful wife gave me children who think and speak like the toilet. I have four garbage sons: The first son is named Royce, the second son is named Preston, the third son is named Lance and Blake (two names for just one son), and the fourth son is the dreaded Laramie." On January 13th, 2015, Twitter user @JuliusIrvington^[4] tweeted a picture of Mike Huckabee's family, saying that Huckabee literally had large adult sons. The tweet gained over 170 retweets and 390 likes (shown below).

On November 11th, 2015, a post of the same picture was posted to Imgur. ^[5] In 2016, the phrase started seeing use in the Gawker network. On July 6th, 2016, Gawker^[6] referenced the joke when it posted about a video of Donald Trump introducing his son Eric with “I love you! My boy! I love you! That’s my 6'6 boy!” (shown below). On July 13th, Deadspin^[7] posted a video about Shaquille O'Neal's basketball-playing son and called him his "large adult son."

It continued seeing use online, particularly in reference to sports. On October 5th, 2016, the SB Nation^[9] fan blog for the USF football team posted about their punter, Jonathan Hernandez, who fans had nicknamed "Large Adult Punter." April 21st, 2017, SB Nation^[8] wrote about baseball player Aaron Judge as "our large adult baseball son." On August 4th, The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino^[1] wrote a history and explainer of the Large Adult Sons meme, applying it to Trump sons Donald Jr. and Eric. Tolentino compared Donald Jr.'s Email Tweet Scandal to the characteristic of the Large Adult Son that "though he does nothing right, he can do no wrong."

Following the viral spread of Wyatt Koch's Shirt Video led people to revive the meme. For example, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes^[10] compared Koch to a Large Adult Son, gaining over 140 retweets (shown below).