Sphere Cow

About

Sphere Cow refers to a taxidermy cow created by artist Geza Szollosi that spread online as an example of Crappy Taxidermy before becoming an ironic meme in surreal and shitpost subreddits.

Origin

The cow was created by artist Geza Szollosi and appeared at Scope MIAMI^[1] between December 2nd and 6th 2009.^[2] The image which became known as Sphere Cow appears on the artist's Blogspot page about the event (shown below).

Spread

The piece was posted on crappytaxidermy.com^[3] on April 4th, 2010. It did not see much spread online until June 4th, 2015, however, when it was posted to Reddit's /r/WTF, gaining over 2,200 points.^[4] There, users speculated the piece may be a reference to the "Sphere Cow" joke popular in mathematics.^[5] It began seeing use in memes in late 2018, starting with November 9th a post in /r/comedyheaven^[6] that used the piece as a nonsensical punchline in the When You Tell a Slightly Offensive Joke at the Dinner Table template, gaining over 17,000 points (shown below, left). On November 16th, a joke using Sphere Cow was posted to /r/okbuddyretard^[7] that gained over 2,300 points.

Over the following months, the cow became one of the staple memes of the subreddit, along with other memes like Walter Clements and OK So Basically I'm Monky. On November 30th, the cow was paired with the selfie dog dubbed "Walter" by the subreddit in a Who Would Win meme, gaining over 4,600 points (shown below, left). Another post by user JohnCenasLeftElbow compared the cow to the dog, gaining over 4,200 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References