About

Sarcastically Surprised Kirk refers to an image from the 1970s animated Star Trek of Captain Jim Kirk appearing bemused. The image is typically paired with captions where a person who need to pretend to be shocked.

Origin

The images are stills from the Season 2, Episode 4 episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series called "Albatross,"^[1] which aired September 28th, 1974. The scene occurs towards the end of the episode^[2] and is Kirk's reaction to Spock and Bones bickering (GIF of the moment shown below).

Spread

The image began seeing use as a reaction image towards the end of 2015. One of the first major posts using the pictures as a display of sarcastic shock was posted November 4th, 2015 to /r/blackpeopletwitter,^[3] gaining over 12,000 upvotes (shown below, left). On November 7th, Twitter user @gothlatina^[4] posted a variation that gained over 1,100 retweets and 1,400 likes (shown below, right).

The image continued to spread over the following years with various popular captions. A thread with multiple variations was posted to Funnyjunk on December 23rd, 2015 (example shown below, left). On June 3rd, 2016, Twitter user @Lili_Claire posted a variation that was later featured in a Buzzfeed article.^[5]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References