What is Bad Joke Eel?

Bad Joke Eel is an advice animal image macro featuring a close-up Moray eel photo captioned with terrible puns and jokes, first popularized on Reddit's r/AdviceAnimals in January 2012.

Where did Bad Joke Eel come from?

The eel photograph was taken by Jeffrey N. Jeffords while scuba diving in the Philippines, and the first captioned Bad Joke Eel macro was posted to r/AdviceAnimals on January 12, 2012.

What does Bad Joke Eel mean?

It's a pun-delivery format where the wide-mouthed eel image sells intentionally awful wordplay, based on Jeffords' underwater photography.

How do you use Bad Joke Eel?

Take the standard Moray eel photo and add a two-line caption with a pun setup on top and the bad punchline on the bottom, in the same layout used by other advice animals.

Is Bad Joke Eel still popular?

The meme peaked in early 2012 with 700+ Quickmeme variants inside four days and BuzzFeed roundups pushing it to a wider audience; it's now regarded as a classic from the advice animal era rather than a currently trending format.

Bad Joke Eel

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Published September 24, 2026

Bad Joke Eel is an advice animal image macro that pairs a close-up Moray eel photograph with intentionally terrible puns and dad jokes. The format broke out on Reddit's r/AdviceAnimals on January 12, 2012 and quickly became a fixture of the pun-macro wave alongside Lame Pun Coon and Chemistry Cat.

advice animals pun memes captioned animal memes image macro memes subreddit origin memes

Overview

Bad Joke Eel is an advice animal image macro that pairs a close-up Moray eel photograph with terrible puns and unfunny one-liners5. The wide-mouthed eel stares straight out of the frame while the caption drops the worst wordplay possible, making the joke feel like an inescapable ambush.

The base image is an underwater shot from marine photographer Jeffrey N. Jeffords, taken during a diving trip in the Philippines1. Captions follow the two-line advice animal format with a setup on the top row and the punchline on the bottom2. The gimmick is that every joke is deliberately bad, so the more eye-rolling the pun the better it fits the template.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Reddit (r/AdviceAnimals)

Date

2012

Jeffords took the Moray eel photograph while scuba diving in the Philippines and posted it on his personal site Dive Gallery1. The first Bad Joke Eel image macro landed on Reddit's r/AdviceAnimals on January 12, 2012, where the thread hit the front page and pulled over 400,000 image views inside four days2.

The eel photo had shown up in pun form years earlier without the Bad Joke Eel name attached. A FARK forum commenter used it on October 13, 2009 to illustrate the phrase 'that's amore'6, and the humor site So Much Pun ran a captioned version on January 25, 20115. The r/AdviceAnimals post is what fixed the eel to the name and locked in the format.

How It Spread

A Quickmeme page for Bad Joke Eel went live the same day as the Reddit debut and collected more than 700 user-made variants inside four days3. Copies then hopped across the humor blog circuit, appearing on I Can Has Cheezburger, Sad and Useless, and FunnyJunk5.

BuzzFeed compiled a roundup post titled 'The Best / Worst of Bad Joke Eel' that pushed the meme beyond the Reddit and Quickmeme crowd4. New captions kept trickling in through 2012 as users piled onto the low-effort, high-payoff pun format3.

How to Use This Meme

Grab the standard Moray eel photograph, then write a two-line caption. Put the pun setup on top and the groan-inducing punchline on the bottom. The joke should be intentionally bad because that's the whole point of the format3.