Overly Manly Man

Confirmed 862,950

Part of a series on Advice Animals. [View Related Entries]

About

Overly Manly Man is an advice animal type of image macro series featuring a black-and-white photograph of a shirtless, mustachioed man with captions portraying the subject as an overtly masculine alpha male with misogynistic attitudes. The advice animal bears many similarities to other alpha male characters including Chuck Norris, Vernon Koekemoer, Epic Beard Man and Technoviking.

Origin

Redditor rken3824 submitted a post titled "Introducing Overly Manly Man" to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[4] subreddit on September 24th, 2012, which featured an image macro using a photo of the late 1800s boxer Mike Conley^[9] (shown below, left) with the caption "Colors? / You mean those things woman and gays like?" (shown below). Within 72 hours, the post received over 11,300 up votes and 300 comments.

Spread

On September 25th, the men’s humor blog Guyism^[2] published a post titled “Overly Manly Man: New Meme Your Should Know" describing the character as a man solely interested in “steak, whiskey and testosterone.” The same day, the men’s humor site Brobible^[3] featured a compilation post titled “Overly Manly Man Meme,” likening the advice animal to the character Ron Swanson from the American TV sitcom Parks and Recreation. Also on September 25th, Redditor mrfeathers51 submitted a post titled “Overly Manly Man [FIXED],”^[6] featuring a photo of Ron Swanson with the caption “I’m a simple man / I enjoy pretty, dark-haired women, and breakfast food” (shown below, left). On the following day, FunnyJunk^[7] user mrnishilion submitted an image macro with the caption “‘How would you like your steak?’ / Breathing” (shown below, right). Within two days, the post received over 59,000 views and 2,629 up votes.

Throughout the week, similar compilations of notable examples from the series were featured on a number of men's lifestyle blogs and humor sites, including the internet humor site Pleated Jeans^[1] and the men’s lifestyle blog TSBMag^[8] on September 27th and the Internet humor site Izismile^[5] on September 28th.