TED Talk Gorilla

Submission 29,945

Part of a series on TED. [View Related Entries]

About

TED Talk Gorilla refers to an image of a gorilla from the Los Angeles Zoo who is sitting and gesturing with his mouth open in front of onlookers, making it appear as though he was delivering a lecture.

Origin

On July 23rd, 2014, the photo appeared in a press release from the Los Angeles Zoo^[3] promoting their "Brew at the Zoo" event (shown below).

On June 22nd, 2017, the LAist Twitter^[4] used the photo to promote the event as one of "20 Awesome Events Happening In Los Angeles." Twitter user @nilaffle^[5] remarked of the photo, "This gorilla looks like he decided to have this undergrad philosophy lecture outside since it's a nice day."

Spread

Once the photo hit Twitter, users began making jokes about how the gorilla appeared to be giving a lecture to the onlookers. On June 23rd, Twitter user @CardChronicle^[6] posted the image with a caption making it appear as though the gorilla was talking about how he overcame his drug addiction (shown below, left). On the 24th, @memeprovider^[7] posted a joke referencing Harambe (shown below, right).

On the 24th, Twitter user @Pattymo^[8] tweeted the image with the caption "The only TED Talk I'd see," which caused UPROXX^[9] to coin the name "TED Talk Gorilla." On June 25th, 2017, Redditor lexlevi^[1] submitted the picture to /r/pics with the caption "This gorilla looks like he decided to have his undergraduate philosophy lecture outside since it's a nice day." The post gained over 131,000 points and was the top post on /r/pics that day. Later that day, the Twitter account for the Los Angeles Zoo^[2] confirmed that the picture was taken at their Roaring Night event. The jokes have been covered by Uproxx,^[9] Huffington Post,^[10] and HelloGiggles.^[11]