A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

Thrown Out the Window

What this meme means

Comic-strip meme about a meeting where an employee with a sensible idea is thrown out of the window while everyone else keeps pitching nonsense. Published in December 2012, it spread across imageboards and Reddit in January 2013.

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Plot and structure

The comic is built around a meeting. In the top panel an angry man in glasses looks at the person he's talking to; in the bottom panel a calm character rests his head on his hand. On the right, a building is shown with a figure falling out of a window. This frame is the main plot device: a proposal that seems useful leads to an absurd outcome.

The joke rests on the contrast between a formal meeting and its abrupt resolution. The scene is played as grotesque: the participants are discussing work, and the reaction to an inconvenient idea turns out to be extreme. The figures are drawn in a cartoonish style, so the plot reads as absurd rather than as a real incident.

Origin

The comic first appeared on December 24, 2012, on the webcomic site Hejibits under the title "Outlook Oust." It shows a meeting at Nintendo's office discussing features for the Wii U console. The comic's author is unknown.

The original reference was tied to a specific company and product, but the template was quickly carried over to other topics. Its further spread is linked to its universal meeting scheme rather than to the original reference.

Spread in january 2013

On January 3, 2013, a thread started on the /b/ board of the imageboard 4chan where participants drew their own versions of the comic; according to sources, around a hundred of them were made. On January 5, screenshots of that thread appeared on Reddit, and a version with the MTV logo, posted to r/funny, gathered more than 7,500 upvotes over nine days.

On January 11, 2013, the picture appeared on Cheezburger in a version featuring snacks, and on January 14 a "Boardroom Suggestion Memes" page was created on Facebook, which quickly gained followers. These events show how the template moved between platforms within a matter of weeks.

Why the meme became popular

The popularity comes down to simplicity and flexibility. To adapt it, it's enough to swap out the brand, the meeting's topic, or the subject of the proposal, while the rest stays the same. Users quickly saw in the scheme a convenient form of irony about corporate meetings.

The plot reads easily without context: the viewer understands what happened from a single picture. Thanks to that, the template became established as a universal image of an absurd meeting and keeps being used across all kinds of topics.

Significance of the template

The meme became a textbook example of how a short comic turns into a set of variations. Within the first weeks dozens of versions had already appeared based on it, and this process shows how a template moves between platforms and adapts to new brands and local topics. This kind of dynamic is typical of early-2010s internet culture.

The image of a meeting with someone falling out and absurd proposals following is understandable even without knowing the original source, so it's often used as an illustration of absurd decisions at work and in correspondence.

Image

The attached image matches the catalog's description: in the top panel an angry man in glasses looks forward, in the bottom panel a calm character rests his head on his hand, and on the right a building is shown with a figure falling out of a window. The scene is drawn in a comic-strip style, and the falling figure looks like a stylized cartoon character.

The image doesn't depict real people and doesn't show a real incident, so it matches the meme's format. There are no caveats about the match.