About

Sad Kanye is a photoshop meme based on an Instagram photograph of the American rapper Kanye West looking morose while sitting on a lawn chair in zip line gear during a trip to Mexico in April 2014.

Origin

On April 30th, 2014, Instagram user and photographer Alex Yenni^[1] posted an Instagram photo of a picture he found in a zip-lining office in Mexico^[2] which features a smiling Kim Kardashian with Kanye West sitting slightly behind them and looking sad (shown below). The photo’s caption reads:

"Bumped into Kim. Kanye wasn't thrilled."

In less than a week the photo gained over 100 likes.

The photograph was most likely taken in July 2012, as suggested by another photograph of West and Kardashian in the same outfits and gear tweeted out by Girls Gone Wild’s Joe Francis^[3] on July 31st, 2012 (shown below). The photoshop meme didn't begin until May 1st, 2014, when Redditor loltatz submitted the picture to the subreddit r/pics^[7]. In less than a week, the photo gained over 16,000 upvotes.

Spread

On May 2nd, 2014, the original photo was covered by The Huffington Post,^[4] followed by roundups of the best examples of the photoshop meme on Death and Taxes^[5], Slate^[6] and SheKnows.^[8] Also on May 2nd, the single topic blog Sad Kanye Doing Stuff^[9] was created on Tumblr.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References