Before the internet

The 1921 “first meme” cartoon

1921

The cartoon most often called the first meme was printed in May 1921 in the Wisconsin Octopus, the University of Wisconsin’s humour magazine. It shows the same young man twice: “How you think you look when a flashlight is taken”, sleek and sharp, beside “How you really look”, goofy and round-eyed.

Two drawings of the same young man in evening dress: sleek and sharp, then goofy and round-eyed — The cartoon as Judge reprinted it in July 1921: “How you think you look when a flashlight is taken.” and “How you really look.” Scan of Judge, 1921, from Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Year: May 1921
Made by: An unknown cartoonist, for a student humour magazine
Where it started: The Wisconsin Octopus, the University of Wisconsin’s humour magazine
What it was: A two-panel cartoon
Also called: How you think you look when a flashlight is taken, Expectation vs. Reality, 1921

The story

A flashlight, then, was a flash photograph: in 1921 the flash came from burning powder, since factory-made flashbulbs only went on sale in 1929. The national humour weekly Judge reprinted the drawing that July, crediting the Octopus. Nobody knows for sure who drew it; a small monogram on it may read HFT.

Almost a hundred years later, on 15 April 2018, a Twitter user posted a scan of the Judge page, saying the joke still worked. Within about three days it had gone from Tumblr and Twitter to the BBC, Time and Vice as the first meme.

Many of those stories said Judge was a University of Iowa magazine. It was not: Judge was a weekly published in New York, and the scan simply came from the University of Iowa library’s copy. The cartoon was first printed in Wisconsin, where the university archives still hold the original.

Why it matters

It shows that the expectation-versus-reality joke, now one of social media’s most familiar formats, was being drawn a century ago. It is also a handy way to explain what a meme is: as the BBC argued when it found the same two-panel joke in an Octopus from a year or two earlier, one drawing is just a joke, but a format copied with variations is a meme.

Where it is now

It is the example people reach for when asked for the oldest meme. Published in 1921, it is in the public domain in the United States, and a scan of it on Wikimedia Commons now illustrates Wikipedia’s article on self-image.

Sources

Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.

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