Singing / Screaming Pasta

Submission 28,233

About

Singing / Screaming Pasta refers to two images of pasta that look like screaming or singing faces, which became the subject of photoshops and memes in late 2020.

Origin

On December 28th, 2020, bayabikomigim posted a tweet^[1] that roughly translates to, "This pasta has started to scream for no reason, what should I do?" along with an image of a cooked lumaconi pasta, photographed at an angle that made it look like a wide-mouthed, screaming face (shown below, left). The post gained over 35,900 likes in 2 weeks. Less than an hour later he commented another photo of three identical noodles, making reference to them as "the three tenors" (shown below, right).

Spread

In late December 2020, Twitter users began using the images in Twitter memes, both photoshopping them to change the context and making them into image macros using Twitter text, often writing song lyrics above each image. On December 31st, 2020, Muttafaaa tweeted^[8] both pasta images under a selection of lyrics from Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" garnering over 141,000 likes and 22,800 retweets in just over a week (shown below).

In early January the trend took off. On January 2nd, 2021, Reina_li105 tweeted^[2] the two images with lyrics from Beyoncé's song "It's All Over," garnering over 64,000 likes and 15,000 retweets in 6 days (shown below, left). On January 5th, unacademy tweeted^[3] a meme reading, "Teacher: Good morning students! Students: Goooooooood mooornnnninnnnggg Teacher!" with the pasta representing each character, garnering over 900 likes in 3 days (shown below, right).

On the same day, u/aman12301 made a post to /r/funny^[4] titled, "It's contagious" using the images of pasta next to text reading, "when someone yawns" and "everyone in the room" garnering over 1,600 upvotes before being removed by moderators (shown below, left). On January 7th, u/Wieland_T_H posted the image of the single pasta noodle under the title "but it wants it so bad…" to /r/dontputyourdickinthat^[5] garnering over 9,200 upvotes in a day (shown below, right).

On the same day, NDTV^[6] and The Indian Express^[7] posted compilations of the screaming pasta memes.