A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.
Surprise, Motherfucker is a line spoken by Detective James Doakes in season one of Dexter. Delivered stone-faced in an unexpected confrontation, it became a universal comeback in internet arguments and an image macro.
Add your captionThe editor opens with this picture. You can download the finished meme as a PNG.
The image is a still from the show: a man in a dark polo shirt stands against a backdrop of metal containers and a dock crane. His face is serious and tense, his gaze fixed on someone outside the frame. Without context the scene looks like a moment right before a confrontation, which is exactly why this freeze-frame works so well as a meme.
The combination of a stern look and a blunt, almost absurdly aggressive line turns the still into a universal reaction. Viewers who know the scene instantly recall the conflict, while those who don't simply see a wary character bracing for a confrontation.
The line appeared in the episode "Born Free," the first-season finale of Dexter, which aired on Showtime on December 17, 2006. In the scene, Detective James Doakes, played by Erik King, unexpectedly confronts Dexter Morgan as he checks a shipping container at the docks, suspecting it holds his mother's remains.
The meme itself emerged online shortly after the episode aired. Fans on LiveJournal used the line as a one-liner joke, and in December 2008 a five-second clip was uploaded to YouTube. That same month the first YTMND site using the clip appeared, and in January 2011 a site launched that collected the scene spliced into other films.
Reddit was an important milestone: the clip landed there in October 2010 and had racked up more than 1.98 million views by May 2012. Themed Tumblr blogs followed, collecting variations and edits. Starting in January 2012, users began making image macros with stills of Doakes, swapping the word "surprise" for other words, such as "Damn Flies" or "Bowties."
In March 2012, Cory Brannigan posted a set of such images that racked up more than 70,000 reblogs and made it onto Uproxx. The meme later caught on with Vine too, where Darius Benson made puns in Doakes's manner. In this way the line went from a quote to a format that could be applied to any situation.
The meme is usually posted as a reply to someone else's comment when the reaction is overly harsh or pointedly serious. The image of Doakes accompanies the phrase and creates a contrast between the dramatic nature of the shot and the mundane trigger, such as an argument in the comments or an unexpected piece of news.
The joke's mechanism is simple: the line reads as a wildly aggressive response to something trivial, and that exaggeration gets the laugh. On image boards and forums the meme is also used as a short caption that preserves the original's intonation.
The meme keeps working thanks to the vividness of the line and the recognizability of the shot. The short phrase is easy to remember, and the character's serious image lets it be applied to all sorts of contexts, from jokes to ironic reactions.
The show itself matters too: Dexter had a wide audience, and many viewers recognized the scene. Erik King later spoke about the line's popularity, including around its fifteenth anniversary, underscoring how much the phrase has outlived the show itself.
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