About

The Rejection /The Clown is a two-panel image macro series used to express feelings of frustration following rejection from a potential romantic partner. In these memes, users post a screenshot of a text conversation between themselves and their potential love interest under the caption "the rejection" and under the "the clown," a selfies, indicating that they consider themselves to be a fool for trying (similar to Art/Artist and The Poet/The Poem).

Origin

On Janay 20th, 2020, Twitter ^[1] user @mohwrld tweeted the earliest known version of the meme. However, the post has since been deleted.

The following day, Twitter^[2] user @OmarJaujeh retweeted the post and added their own example, which is the earliest still available (shown below).

Spread

On January 22nd, Twitter^[3] user @zoyajumshaid tweeted a variation that received more than 498,000 likes and 54,000 retweets in less than two days (shown below, left).

Following the post, others began sharing their own variations of the meme (examples below, center and right).

Various Examples

External References