About

The Pennywise Smile Challenge, often represented as the hashtag #PennywiseSmileChallenge, is an online social game in which participants attempt to mimic the facial expression of Pennywise the Clown from the horror franchise It.

Origin

On September 10th, 2019, the verified Bloody Disgusting Twitter ^[1] shared a photograph of Pennywise actor Bill Skarsgård making the Pennywise smile. They captioned the post, "Can you do the Pennywise Smile? If so, creep us out by commenting below with a picture or video and be sure to use #PennywiseSmileChallenge. We'll RT everyone who participates. Don't be shy! #Pennywise." Within two days, the tweet received more than 390 likes and 60 retweets (shown below).

Spread

Following the post, numerous people began posting photographs of themselves making the face, tagging the image #PennwiseSmileChallenge (examples below, left and center).

Others posted mock versions of pop culture figures making similar smiles (example below, right).

On September 12th, the website PopBuzz^[2] published a report on the memes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References