A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

Dat Boi

What this meme means

Meme of a green frog riding a unicycle, captioned "dat boi", a distortion of "that boy". One of the most recognizable internet characters of 2016, it is used as a cheerful greeting when someone arrives.

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What's shown

The picture shows a green frog in a cartoon style with a dark outline. It's standing on a unicycle with an orange fork and a black wheel, one arm stretched out to the side and the other bent at its hip. The head is tilted slightly upward, the eyes round and expressive, and the whole figure looks confident and a bit theatrical.

Around the figure, on a white background, are two pieces of text: "dat" on the left, "boi" on the right. The large black letters in a plain font are legible at a glance, and it's exactly this composition — the frog standing between the two halves of the phrase — that became the meme's recognizable mark.

The picture is designed for quick reading: bright green color, a simple silhouette, and contrasting text. This visual style is easy to drop into any feed, rework into animation, or combine with other captions, which later happened.

Origin of the image

The frog wasn't an internet user's original creation. It was taken from a ready-made clip-art collection by the company Animation Factory, where it belonged to sets of animated characters. One of the company's employees reported that the GIF's creator was designer Josh Dohnen, though this attribution isn't confirmed in other sources, and the exact date the drawing was made is unknown.

This commercial origin explains several features of the meme. The image was publicly available, carefully drawn, and ready for reuse, so it was easy to embed into reworkings. Users didn't need to create their own version: it was enough to take the ready-made clip art and add a caption.

Hence the persistent view that the meme has no single author. The figure became recognizable through repeated reworkings across the internet, while the original clip art remained almost unnoticed for a long time, until it gained wide fame in 2016.

The phrase and its path to meme status

The phrase itself appeared before the picture. In the summer of 2015, a Tumblr user posted an image from the game Pac-Man captioned "here come dat boi!!" and "o shit waddup!" The original post was later deleted, but over the course of a year it had accumulated more than 75,800 reblogs. The caption set a joking tone of arrival: someone entering the frame with a loud, dramatic announcement.

In 2014, a photoshop with the name "Dat Boi" used as a username turns up on FunnyJunk, meaning the word itself was already in use online before the frog became attached to it. Later, the pairing of the phrase and the green figure finally came together.

The first wide publication of this pairing took place on April 3, 2016, when a Facebook page posted the frog captioned "here come dat boi!!!!!! / o shit waddup!" Within a few weeks, variants appeared on Tumblr: a montage with five frogs captioned "we dem bois," reworkings of poorly compressed images, and new texts that kept the rhythm of the greeting.

Spread in 2016

In spring 2016 the meme quickly moved beyond Tumblr. The "Dat Boi" Facebook page gathered more than a hundred thousand followers, and on May 3 a music video by the artist ZimoNitrome appeared, built around the same figure. The next day, Twitter reported that the frog had made it into a physics textbook, though this report isn't confirmed by an official source.

Major media outlets also took notice of the meme. The Guardian included it in a roundup of notable memes from June 2016, and the sites Vox, NYMag, and Paper devoted separate pieces to it. On May 13, 2016, Nintendo tweeted about Slippy Toad next to the frog, and the Denny's chain jokingly called the character "Dat Busboi."

Pepe's creator, Matt Furie, admitted he was upset that Dat Boi was starting to overshadow Pepe. This remark is often cited as an example of how quickly a new meme can push a previous image out of the spotlight.

Controversy and later resurgences

In May 2016, the phrase was criticized for appropriating elements of African American English, and some Facebook groups banned its use. The controversy showed how quickly a joke about a frog can become the subject of a debate about cultural appropriation.

The meme itself kept living on after its peak. In March 2017 it was revived on the subreddit /r/me_irl, and in September of that year a second wave began. The picture is usually used as a greeting for someone or something's appearance, paired with a dramatic line, as well as in montages and GIFs.

Typical reworkings include changing the background, adding other characters, and parody texts. Thanks to its simple premise and recognizable figure, Dat Boi remains an example of how mundane clip art turns into internet folklore.