Prankster Joe Biden

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Part of a series on Joe Biden. [View Related Entries]

About

Prankster Joe Biden, also known as Biden Bro, is a series of captioned photographs in which United States Vice President Joe Biden discusses ways to prank president-elect Donald Trump at the White House.

Origin

On November 9th, 2016, Republican candidate Donald Trump was projected to receive over the 270 electoral votes needed to become president-elect of the United States. The following day, Twitter user Mollie Goodfellow posted a photograph of Joe Biden peering out the window captioned with a mock dialogue in which the vice president threatens to assault Donald Trump (shown below, left).^[1] Two hours later, Goodfellow tweeted a picture of Biden holding captioned with a scheme to throw the ball at Trump (shown below, right).^[2] Over the next four days, the tweets gained over 93,000 and 100,000 likes respectively.

Precursor

On January 20th, 2015, Twitter user Jamie Woodham posted a photograph of Biden seated with Obama, in which the vice president jokes that the state of the union is "on fleek" (shown below, left).^[9] On February 6th, Twitter user Reverend Scott posted a similar captioned photograph of Biden and Obama laughing together while seated on a lawn (shown below, right).^[10]

Spread

On November 10th, 2016, Twitter user @jbillinson^[7] tweeted a photograph of Biden walking with Barack Obama in which the vice president reveals that he "left a Kenyan passport" on the president's desk (shown below). Within four days, the tweet gathered upwards of 14,900 likes and 10,300 retweets.

On November 11th, the /r/BidenBro^[8] subreddit was launched for captioned photos of Joe Biden. Within 72 hours, the subreddit gained over 34,000 subscribers. On November 12th, Redditor BigLeagueMAGA posted a photograph of Biden standing with vice president-elect Mike Pence captioned with a mock conversation between the two men to /r/The_Donald,^[11] where it gathered upwards of 8,400 votes (81% upvoted) and 340 comments in 48 hours (shown below).

That day, Redditor EpicForever submitted a post titled "Joe Biden and Mike Pence Memes on the Rise Now!" to /r/MemeEconomy,^[3] where it received upwards of 10,200 posts and 190 comments in two days. In the coming days, other posts about the Biden meme reached the front page of the subreddit.^[4]^[5]^[6] Meanwhile, several news sites published articles about the captioned image series, including The Washington Post,^[12] The Huffington Post^[13] and BBC.^[14]