About

What the Hell Is This? is an object labeling exploitable meme taken from a Family Guy still in which Noah from the Bible story of Noah's Ark asks an elephant and a penguin "What the Hell Is This?" in reference to a hybrid elephant/penguin child. In the object labeling exploitables, the elephant and the penguin are labeled two different things, while the hybrid child is labeled something representative of a mix between the two.

Origin

The image comes from the Season 4, episode 25 Family Guy episode "You May Now Kiss the… Uh… Guy Who Receives," which aired April 30th, 2006.^[1]

On November 7th, 2018, Redditor lukazey^[2] posted an example of an object-labeling format based off a screenshot from the scene, gaining over 850 points (shown below).

Spread

Over the following several months, the format began growing popular through Reddit. On January 12th, 2019, posts in /r/memes^[3] and /r/freefolk^[4] gained over 40,000 and 1,100 points, respectively (shown below).

It continued seeing spread throughout the following months of 2019. For example, a meme about Tetris 99 posted to /r/dankmemes on February 19th gained over 13,000 points (shown below, left). On February 12th, a post to Imgur gained over 1,900 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References