Brother May I Have Some Oats is a copypasta built around an 1850 oil painting called A Pair of Pigs, showing two hefty pigs standing side by side in a pen2. The joke pairs the antique farm scene with an exaggeratedly polite request, imagining the pigs as Victorian brothers asking each other for breakfast1.

On 4chan, the format became known as oatposting, with users on /s4s/ and /r9k/ swapping variants like "Brother dear, would you please pas the oats?" and "May I have some oats, brother"3. The humor sits in the mismatch between the stately painting, the formal English, and the fact that the speakers are two pigs.

The template typically pairs the A Pair of Pigs painting with a short, overly polite request written in mock-Victorian English. Common conventions include addressing the other pig as "brother" or "brother dear," and asking for oats, though users often swap in other requests or reframe the pigs as characters in longer copypasta exchanges3.