If you were on the Internet in the past week (and where else would you be?) you couldn't possibly have avoided the Mr. Krabs meme. The purveyor of Krabby Patties has been all over Twitter and Instagram, as ubiquitous as the 43rd round of Trump think pieces. The viral photo features Mr. Krabs confused to a blur, surrounded by an angry mob. His bewilderment is flexible enough to give everyone a shot at a fire tweet, essentially following the "TFW" format. It works for something as innocuous as waking up in a room full of people or being so fucked up the room spins. A whole damn account is now dedicated to rapid-fire jokes. A Mr. Krabs Kontent Farm, if you will.
When ur mom leave u in the grocery store line saying brb and you at the front and she ain't back yet pic.twitter.com/jyN1iT71Fu
But where did this shit come from?
The screenshot comes from the classic season two episode "Patty Hype," in which SpongeBob breaks off from his money-hungry, labor-law-flouting boss and sells Pretty Patties in "six designer colors"—a business pitch Mr. Krabs scoffed at. The idea is gold (and green, and purple, etc.), so master manipulator Mr. Krabs comes back in the picture and offers to trade his barren Krusty Krab for the rights to Pretty Patties. SpongeBob is seemingly duped into taking the deal, but it turns out the designer meat turns the customers tongues into the colors of their respective burgers. So it's Mr. Krab's greedy ass that's on the hook for the defect (no Chipotle).
The blur surrounding Mr. Krabs doesn't actually appear in the episode and was edited after the fact. The first such appearance of the edited version seems to be from @isthatahmed, who tweeted on Jan. 31:
When you just wake up from a nap and your parents already yelling at you pic.twitter.com/ksf0Sbop8P
@WorldStarFunny, which parodies WorldStarHipHop and steals the fuck out of other's people's content (a la Fat Jew), re-posted the joke a few days later and set off a train of content jacking.
When you just wake up from a nap and your parents already yelling at you pic.twitter.com/vwc4iH8F3L
Now, a month later, the meme is all over our feeds, and it's even been used to ether Future after Ciara became engaged with Russell Wilson.
When you ask for a Sprite but they bring you a Ciara mist instead pic.twitter.com/elMLk08HH9
Unfortunately, "Patty Hype" isn't streaming on Nickelodeon's website. But the Internet is a vast resource not immune to a cursory search. Go find it for a fit of nostalgia and to see where these dank (soon-to-be-beat-to-death) memes originated from.
when it went from 1:59 to 3:00 pic.twitter.com/BMFQo0lhmG
when a rapper does some wild shit and u gotta report for complex but u two bottles of wine deep pic.twitter.com/GQRIDhuLEk
