Trying to Hold a Fart Next to a Cute Girl in Class

Confirmed 422,444

About

"Trying to Hold a Fart Next to a Cute Girl in Class" is a reaction image featuring a male student sitting in a classroom while wearing a strained, red-faced facial expression. The picture is often captioned with humorous frustrations or uncomfortable situations.

Origin

On March 2nd, 2014, Redditor aaduk_ala submitted a photograph titled "Trying to hold a fart next to a cute girl in class" to the /r/funny^[1] subreddit (shown below). Prior to being archived, the post gained over 2,500 votes (88% upvoted) and 500 comments.

Spread

The photo has gained large notability around many social networking sites such as Twitter and Instagram, where users often post the picture along with its original caption. On March 2nd, FunnyJunk^[3] user hiddenwarrior reposted the original photograph. The following day, the @LADBible^[6] twitter feed posted the photograph. On March 4th, the same image was reposted to 9gag.^[2] On December 25th, Redditor Professorloth64 submitted a photoshopped version of the image titled "Feminists" to /r/ImGoingToHellForThis^[4] (shown below, left). In 72 hours the post garnered upwards of 3,600 votes (89% upvoted). On December 28th, the Daquan^[5] Instagram feed posted the same photoshop with the caption "When all men are pigs and you haven't told anyone in 8 minutes" (shown below, right). In less than 24 hours, the post accumulated more than 136,000 likes.

Identity

On January 4th, The Daily Dot ran an article^[7] identifying the male student depicted in the photograph as Michael McGee, an 18-year-old student at Northwest High School in Justin, Texas. According to the interview with McGee, the picture was taken during a class and uploaded to Twitter by his friend Mathew sometime around October 2013, though it captured little attention at the time of the upload.

"Me and my friend Mathew were just hanging out in class and I've been good friends with Mathew since forever so he knew I could make that face prior [to] that day. So we thought he could make a funny tweet--as me and Mathew were quite well-known around school for being funny guys on Twitter--so I made the face and he captioned it something and it got little or almost no attention."

When asked whether he has felt any regret about his internet fame, McGee responded:

“My take on being ‘internet famous’ is cool and all. But I regret not copyrighting the picture right away because I could have made a lot of money there!”