Talking To Brick Wall

About

Talking To Brick Wall refers to an image and video clip of a Black man having a conversation with a brick wall, originating from a November 2010 YouTube video poking fun at how it tends to feel talking about politics to other people. A screenshot from the video began seeing use in image macros and as a reaction image as early as 2014. In July 2020, a GIF of the video was added as an emote to Twitch streamer xQc's channel. The clip's popularity in memes continued to increase into 2021.

Origin

On November 22nd, 2010, YouTuber^[1] Maronzio Vance posted a comedy skit in which he has a one-sided conversation with a brick wall in order to demonstrate how talking politics tends to feel, the caption reading, "At times I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall. So I went out and found one that will listen" (shown below). The video gained over 151,000 views in 11 years.

Spread

A screenshot from the video showing a still image of Vance in mid-conversation with the wall became the subject of memes as early as 2014 on sites like Tumblr and Twitter to joke about conversations that go nowhere (examples shown below, left and right).

The format continued to grow over the following years, spreading across social media.

DonoWall

On July 1st, 2020, a fan of Twitch streamer xQc, FewBreath, submitted^[2] a GIF of the video with the name DonoWall as an emote to Twitch extension BetterTTV (shown below). On the same day, FewBreath posted^[3] the emote to xQc's subreddit as a candidate to be used on xQc's Twitch channel. xQc added the emote later that day. Before being archived, FewBreath's Reddit post received over 2.2k upvotes. As of September 6th, 2021, DonoWall is in use^[2] on over 28,000 channels.

On July 13th, 2020, a definition for DonoWall relating to xQc was added^[4] to Urban Dictionary (shown below).

Continued Spread

On December 28th, 2020, YouTuber^[5] ItsPaul posted a sped-up version of the clip, garnering over 67,000 views in seven months (shown below).

On January 23rd, 2021, Redditor r4jan posted an image macro to /r/dankmemes^[6] using a video version of the clip, gaining over 28,500 upvotes in six months (shown below).

On July 28th, Instagram^[7] meme page @patrickwarburtonfan53 posted an image macro joking about talking to Herobrine deniers, gaining over 15,000 likes in two days (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References