Fish Chicken Smoking A Cigarette

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Fish Chicken Smoking A Cigarette is a bizarre image showing a trout head fused into a chicken carcass with a lit cigarette dangling from its mouth. It first surfaced on Reddit in January 2012 and spread through /r/WTF and /r/funny as one of the site's early shock-humor repost staples.

Overview

Fish Chicken Smoking A Cigarette is a photograph of a raw plucked chicken with the head of a trout jammed into the neck cavity, a lit cigarette wedged between the fish's lips1. The composition reads as a piece of amateur kitchen taxidermy, and the deadpan absurdity of the fish appearing to enjoy a smoke break is the whole joke2.

The picture became one of the anchor examples of what Reddit users in the early 2010s called a 'WTF' image, cursed content shared purely for its shock and confusion value1. It has no caption template and no punchline text, the image itself is the meme, usually reposted with a short reaction title like 'Got a Light?' or 'I Don't Even'3.

How It Spread

Across the rest of 2012, the image was reposted to /r/WTF and /r/funny at least a dozen times under titles like 'Fish inside a chicken smoking a cigarette' and 'Chicken Stuffed with Smoked Salmon'4. A Facebook page called 'Chicken fish smoking a cigarette' was set up on February 16th, 2012, though it only picked up around 60 followers1.

On January 27th, 2014, Meme Generator opened a Chicken Fish Smoking gallery that eventually held 73 user-made derivatives, mostly captioned reaction versions of the original photo5. In May 2014, an Android developer released a Flappy Bird clone built around the character, extending the meme briefly into mobile gaming1.

By August 2016, a reverse image search on Karma Decay turned up at least 24 unique Reddit threads featuring the picture, and copies had also drifted onto Twitter1. The image is still cited as a canonical early cursed image and gets pulled back into 'weird stuff from old Reddit' compilations years after its first post2.

How to Use This Meme

There is no caption template. People typically repost the original photo as-is with a short reaction-style title, often something the fish might 'say' such as 'Got a Light?' or 'Hi How's It Going'3. The common convention is to let the image speak for itself rather than adding overlay text.

Frequently Asked Questions