Dick The Birthday Boy — Full uncropped birthday party photo of Dick with the wide-eyed mascot and birthday cake on table

Dick The Birthday Boy

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Published August 17, 2026

Dick the Birthday Boy is a vintage Polaroid of a young Rich Evans from Red Letter Media posing beside the Billy Bob Bear mascot at ShowBiz Pizza, made instantly meme-worthy by his shirt reading "Dick the Birthday Boy." First surfaced as an on-camera prank in a 2013 Best of the Worst episode, it spread as a cursed image across Reddit and Tumblr.

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Overview

Dick the Birthday Boy is a Polaroid photograph showing a young Rich Evans, presenter and actor at video production company Red Letter Media, standing beside Billy Bob Bear, the animatronic mascot of the now defunct ShowBiz Pizza Place chain1. The image gets its name from the shirt Evans is wearing, which pairs his childhood nickname "Dick" with the words "the Birthday Boy," producing an accidentally lewd caption alongside a wide-eyed animatronic bear3.

The photo is treated online as a textbook cursed image and awkward family photo, drawing its comic weight from the vintage color palette, the looming costumed mascot, and the unfortunate wording all landing at once3. Among Red Letter Media fans it is also read as a piece of Rich Evans lore, since the picture is now framed in the RLM studio4.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube (Red Letter Media) / Reddit (viral spread)
Creator
Red Letter Media
Date
2013

The Polaroid dates from Evans's childhood, taken during a birthday visit to a ShowBiz Pizza restaurant. It entered wider circulation on November 5, 2013, when Red Letter Media posted an episode of their Best of the Worst series in which cast members produced the photo on camera to prank Evans, with the reveal appearing around the one-minute mark1. In the same episode, a Billy Bob Bear costume coincidentally shows up in a clip from the Gene Simmons film Trick or Treat, prompting the hosts to point out the overlap1.

How It Spread

The image drifted out of the Red Letter Media fanbase when it was posted without context to Funnyjunk on September 20, 2014, and then to Reddit's r/WTF on November 14, 2014, where it collected more than 7,300 upvotes and picked up its cursed image reputation3. It resurfaced on r/nostalgia on February 18, 2016 with commenters identifying the ShowBiz Pizza setting, then reached r/cursedimages on February 25, 2018 and spread widely across Tumblr posts tagged as cursed3.

The Polaroid hit mainstream television on November 30, 2018, when Julia Roberts appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and was surprised with photos from her teenage job at ShowBiz Pizza, including the Dick the Birthday Boy image, joking that she may have been the one inside the bear costume5. Red Letter Media revisited the story in June 2019 as guests on Macaulay Culkin's Bunny Ears podcast, with the full history of the photo laid out around the 22-minute mark6.

In September 2022, Red Letter Media released a follow-up video titled "Dick the Birthday Boy: The Legacy Continues," revealing the Polaroid was one of a set of family photos that the studio deliberately kept blurred so only in-person guests could see them2. In November 2023 the crew disclosed that a copy of the photo had briefly appeared on the set of the Five Nights at Freddy's live-action film before being removed, with Mike Stoklasa quipping that he would license it to any sequel for one dollar because of the themed-restaurant tie-in4.

How to Use This Meme

The meme is used as a standalone cursed image, dropped into threads about awkward childhood photos, unfortunate name coincidences, or nostalgic pizza-chain animatronics. Common edits add speech balloons on Billy Bob Bear reacting to the shirt, a joke format that circulated on r/memes as early as April 20173.

Frequently Asked Questions