About

Neil deGrasse Tyson Parodies refers to a series of jokes and references to Neil deGrasse Tyson's penchant for pointing out the scientific impossibilities of popular piece of popular culture. These jokes usually include with the phrase "Extremely Neil deGrasse Tyson Voice."

Origin

Since coming to public prominence in the 2000s, science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson has found viral success in pointing out the scientific truth of some of popular cultures most beloved artifacts. Among the earliest known examples of this is from April 2012 when director James Cameron announced that he had re-shot a scene from his 1997 film Titanic to properly display the position of the stars that night. According to Cameron, "Neil deGrasse Tyson sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year, in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen."^[1]

From then on, he became partly known for pointing out issues like this in such films as The Amazing Spider-Man, Thor and Gravity (examples below).

Spread

On March 29th, 2015, Twitter user @atmoaz tweeted, "*neil degrasse tyson voice* it's improbable that matthew mcconaughey would ever go to space. he's an actor! not an astronaut!!!" The tweet is the earliest known example of someone parodying his voice in text.

On May 25th, 2016, the comedy video production company Above Average published a video entitled "Neil deGrasse Tyson: Internet Know-It-All." The video (shown below) depicts Tyson as an obsessing over trolling people on the internet with scientific corrections. Since being uploaded to YouTube, ^[3] the video has received more than 77,000 views.

In January 2018, people on Twitter began parodying Tyson on Twitter with greater frequency. On January 8th, 2018, Twitter user @mrdaddymanphd tweeted,^[4] "*neil degrasse tyson voice* if the globe was made of gold everyone would die." The post (shown below, left) received more than 30 retweets and 200 likes. On January 21st, Twitter^[5] @KrangTNelson tweeted, "DOG 1: hey u know how sometimes ur human has a ball DOG 2: ya DOG 1: sometimes mine throws the ball, but then magically it’s back in his hand! DOG 2: omg DOG 1: I know NEIL DEGRASSE DOG: actually." The tweet (shown below, center) received more than 5,000 retweets and 23,000 likes in two weeks. On January 24th, Twitter^[6] user @SimonMaloy tweeted, "[extremely Degrasse Tyson voice] water can not have a shape, unless it is ice, the movie should be called 'Ice Movie.'" The tweet (shown below, right) received more than 140 retweets and 1,200 likes i one week.

According to an article on the meme by the Daily Dot,^[7] on January 26th, Tyson responded to the popularity of the posts by tweeting^[8] a picture of him dropping a mic with the caption "Don’t make me find you and mic-drop on your ass." The post (shown below) received more than 35,000 retweets and 130,000 likes in five days.

Various Examples

External References