Sidelined Chris Martin

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Part of a series on Super Bowl 50. [View Related Entries]

About

Sidelined Chris Martin is a nickname given to the lead singer of the British rock band Coldplay during their performance at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show on February 7th, 2016. Despite being billed as the headliner of the prestigious event, many viewers at home felt that the English singer-songwriter was upstaged by the sheer star power of his American co-performers, Beyonce and Bruno Mars, which quickly gave birth to a slew of jokes mocking Martin as the "third wheel" on stage.

Origin

On December 3rd, 2015, the National Football League announced that the Grammy Awards-winning British rock band Coldplay would be headlining the halftime show at Super Bowl 50, with Bruno Mars and Beyoncé joining the bill as co-performers of the event. On February 7th, 2016, Coldplay kicked off the halftime show by performing their hit songs, “Viva La Vida," “Paradise" and “Adventure of a Lifetime,” with the frontman Chris Martin taking over the stage to hype up the crowd. However, the spotlight quickly shifted away from Martin once he was joined by Bruno Mars and Beyonce, the latter of whom instantly dominated the stage with a live debut of her latest new single "Formation."

Spread

At 8:39 p.m. (EST), American actress Anna Kendrick made a witty comment about Martin's underwhelming presence on stage via her Twitter account.^[3]

At 8:48 p.m., Internet comedian Josh Ostrovsky (a.k.a @TheFatJew) posted a still shot of the three singers performing on stage together with the caption “when u tryin to fit in” to his Instagram account^[1] (shown below), garnering more than 291,000 likes in less than 24 hours.

At 8:53 p.m., Twitter user @NicoKartel^[14] shared a photoshopped parody based on a still shot of the three performers on stage, superimposing the face of Crying Michael Jordan over that of Chris Martin (shown below).

At 8:57 p.m., BuzzFeed writer Spencer Althouse^[2] tweeted another photoshopped parody in which Martin is completely replaced by an image of the "Left Shark" that went viral during the halftime show at Super Bowl XLIX (shown below).

Throughout the rest of the halftime show, many others jumped on the bandwagon with jokes about how Martin's performance couldn't measure up against Beyonce and Bruno Mars.

News Media Coverage

In the following hours, Chris Martin's newfound meme-dom was picked up by several entertainment and social media news outlets in the United States and United Kingdom, including BuzzFeed^[4], Mashable^[7], Perez Hilton^[6], The Daily Mail^[5], Metro UK^[9] and The Independent.^[11] As news reports about the Internet's reaction to the Super Bowl halftime show circulated online, some articles also highlighted how the singer's daughter, Apple, had warned him about "getting turned into a meme" during the days leading up to the event.