Sheryl's She-shed

Submission 4,178

About

Sheryl's She-shed refers to a commercial for State Farm Insurance that aired from 2018 to 2020. The humorous ad plays with a tongue twister, showing a woman named Sheryl calling State Farm as a shed in her backyard is on fire. She says "It finally happened, somebody burned down my she-shed!", while her husband Victor looks annoyed and says "Nobody burned down your she-shed, Sheryl," insisting it was struck by lightning. The ad has been widely parodied and joked about conspiracies wondering who burned down Sheryl's She-shed.

Origin

State Farm debuted the "She Shed" ad on March 13th, 2018, and it ran until February 23rd, 2020 (shown below).^[1]

State Farm – "She Shed" from DW on Vimeo.

Spread

The ad quickly became a subject of discussion and parody on the internet. On July 3rd, 2018, Redditor styrrell14 posted their reading of the commercial to /r/FanTheories,^[2] interpreting it to mean that Victor burned down Sheryl's She-shed. The post gained over 630 points. Other posts featuring fanciful conspiracies about the plot behind the ad have appeared on Quora^[3] and Reddit.^[4] A meme page named Sheryl's She Shed launched on Facebook^[5] on November 20th, 2018, gaining over 40,000 followers in two years. The commercial and its ensuing memes and life cycle were studied academically by Salvatore Attardo^[6] of Texas A&M.

The ad also inspired several image macros parodying its content and the conspiracies around it. Several have been uploaded to imgflip^[7] (examples shown below).