Tonight On Bottom Gear

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About

Tonight On Bottom Gear refers to a series of image macros and videos based on the British television series Top Gear. The memes act as nonsensical episode openers, describing what's to come in a fictional, absurd imagination of a Top Gear episode. This is often done through voice-over in video variants, and cut-and-paste, ransom note style text clippings in image variants, bearing many similarities to the Expand Dong meme.

Origin

On August 30th, 2020, YouTuber Jixaw, one half of the YouTube channel Compressed Lads,^[1] tweeted out an image of Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson photoshopped above the words "bottom gear" (shown below). Accompanied is the caption, "write the script. (image + caption) go."^[2] The comments attached act as the script for the original bottom gear video.

On September 1st, Compressed Lads uploaded the finished video, titled "bottom gear," to their channel. The now unlisted video features a man with a thick British accent (Jixaw) reading and laughing through the comment thread of his tweet. The comments are purposefully absurd, filled with spelling and grammatical errors, random humor, and allusions to behaviors uncharacteristic of the Top Gear brand. Before being unlisted, "bottom gear" garnered over 469,000 views and 52,000 likes. The video was reuploaded to Jixaw's personal YouTube channel^[3] on September 12th, garnering over 63,000 views and 6.5 thousand likes in 10 days (shown below).

Spread

On September 3rd, 2020, Reddit user NissanSilviaKs^[4] posted the bottom gear video to r/carmemes,^[5] gaining 243 upvotes and multiple awards. On September 10th, Reddit user 2GudOfaDayM8^[6] posted a badly photoshopped image of a Top Gear host overtop of various text clippings to the r/bottomgear subreddit^[6] (shown below). This is the first image posted to the subreddit and garnered 101 upvotes in 12 days.

Interestingly, r/bottomgear was created in 2015, long before the bottom gear meme. According to a post by jihiggs, creator of the subreddit, the subreddit was started as a joke imagining the downfall of Top Gear when Jeremy Clarkson lost his job on the show.^[7]

Bottom gear memes continued to spread across Reddit and Twitter throughout September, typically mimicking the badly photoshopped text clipping format. On Twitter, some users attempt to recreate tweets in the style shown on Jixaw's bottom gear video.^[8] On September 18th, Reddit user TheTitantron^[9] uploaded a bottom gear meme to r/dankmemes, gaining over 11.4 thousand upvotes in 4 days. On September 21st, Reddit user TopGear25S^[10] posted another bottom gear meme to r/dankmemes, garnering over 28.5 thousand upvotes and 95 awards (shown below).

On September 18th, Jixaw posted a tweet asking for comments to be used in a bottom gear 2 video.^[11] The post gained over 1,000 comments and 5.4 thousand likes in four days.