Quick Tell A Lie

About

Quick Tell A Lie is a memorable quote from the 2004 Dreamworks movie Shrek 2 in which the character Shrek asks Pinocchio to lie for his nose to grow so they can escape the prison. A screenshot of the scene has been used as a reaction image, exploitable image macro and object-labeling meme format since early 2019, often featuring captions portraying Pinocchio lying about things considered mainly "true" but the person is lying saying it's not.

Origin

In the original scene, Pinocchio (voiced by Cody Cameron) and the others help break Shrek (Michael Myers), Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) out of prison in a sequence parodying the Mission Impossible movie franchise. For Gingerbread Man (Conrad Vernon) to release Shrek and the other they need Pinocchio to stretch his nose by making him lie, which prompts Shrek to say, "Quick tell a lie."

The scene was uploaded to YouTube by the channel Movieclips^[1] on November 23rd, 2015, where it received over 200,000 views in seven years (shown below).

The earliest found use of the scene in a meme format was posted on Reddit on February 15th, 2019, by Redditor KarsCarmen6,^[2] who added the text, "there more than two genders," as a response to Shrek's "quick tell a lie" line. The post (seen below) received roughly 70 upvotes and 13 comments in five years.

Spread

Throughout the following years, the meme template continued to spread and was later used as a reaction image on Reddit and X / Twitter to point out people lying on the platform.

For example, on April 4th, 2024, Redditor^[3] Hedgehugs_ posted a version of the Pinocchio lying meme with a blank text cloud (seen below), amassing more than 180 upvotes and 270 comments in six months.

On December 11th, 2023, X^[4] user @db_witch posted a version of the meme in which they added a comment about Team Fortress 2 (seen below), amassing over 23,000 likes and 1,700 reposts in a year.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References