"Smoke" Family Guy Subliminal Advertising

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About

"Smoke" Family Guy Subliminal Advertising refers to a cut-away gag in the adult animation Family Guy centered on Big Tobacco doing subliminal messaging in which a man says "Smoke" and "Are ya smoking yet?" The video and images of the man saying "Smoke" became a common meme on iFunny in late 2023, spreading as a reaction image and an exploitable.

Origin

On July 25th, 2001, season 3, episode 3 of Family Guy titled "Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington" aired on American television.^[1] In one scene, Brian Griffin started a cut-away gag that showed a black-and-white parody of Lassie with a man in a suit interrupting the broadcast and saying "Smoke."

The scene was first posted to YouTube on March 20th, 2009, by YouTuber^[2] 19jakeproductions, gaining roughly 409,800 views in 14 years. A higher-quality upload was posted to YouTube^[3] on December 13th, 2017, gaining over 266,400 views in six years (shown below).

The first discovered image macro made with the scene was posted by Redditor Whothehllareyou to the /r/trees^[4] subreddit on April 23rd, 2012, showing the man with a black background and Impact text reading, "SMOKE." (shown below). The post received five upvotes in 11 years.

Spread

The aforementioned image spread online to sites like Imgur^[5] on May 13th, 2016, where it gained over 41,300 views in 10 years. On October 9th, 2015, Imgur^[6] user GiFucked posted a GIF of the man saying, "Smoke," captioned, "This is all I see every time I see an anti smoking commercial." The post gained over 68,100 views in eight years (shown below).

In the 2020s, the image was shared on 4chan^[7]^[8] and Twitter / X.^[9]

In 2023, usage of the "Smoke" scene in Family Guy became increasingly prevalent on iFunny. For instance, on July 23rd, 2023, iFunnier^[10] @HOUSEN posted a YouTube Poop style video with the scene, gaining over 940 smiles in three months (shown below, left). On October 21st, 2023, iFunnier^[11] @1500lbsOfHate captioned the image, "Gonna post this every time I'm having a cig," gaining over 2,700 smiles in 11 days (shown below, right).

Going into October 2023, many on iFunny spammed the "Smoke" image in comment sections. Memes continued to surface, including many that referenced the video game The Coffin of Andy and Leyley because the game's imagery often involved smoking. For instance, on October 25th, 2023, iFunnier^[12] @lucisev posted a Wow Cool Robot meme, gaining roughly 1,400 smiles in five days (shown below).