I Too Like to Live Dangerously

2012image macroclassic

Published September 24, 2026

Pulled from a 1997 Austin Powers blackjack scene, this image macro turned Mike Myers' cocky one-liner into a template for jokes about tiny, trivial acts of rebellion. A November 2012 Reddit post kicked it off and it became one of the go-to advice-animal formats of the early 2010s.

advice animalsimage macro memesmovie quote memescatchphrase memesearly 2010s memes

Overview

I Too Like to Live Dangerously, also written as I Also Like to Live Dangerously, is a two-line image macro built on a smug close-up of Mike Myers from the 1997 film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery2. The top line describes some absurdly small act of risk, and the punchline is always a variant of "I also like to live dangerously"1.

The joke works because the setups are almost never actually dangerous. Popular examples include doing arithmetic in pen instead of pencil, ignoring a "Do not touch" sign at a museum, fast-forwarding a DVR past the point you meant to stop, or trying to catch a legendary Pokemon without saving first36. The format sits in the same family of self-deprecating advice-animal macros that were dominant on Reddit and 9gag between 2011 and 20134.

Origin & Background

Platform
Reddit (r/AdviceAnimals)
Creator
Kcazaa
Date
2012

The screen grab comes from a Las Vegas blackjack scene in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, in which Myers' character calmly asks for a card on 17 against Robert Wagner's Number Two2. The line delivered on screen is "I too like to live dangerously," which is why both wordings circulate as captions3.

The macro version showed up on November 13th, 2012, when Redditor Kcazaa posted "Every time I see people do math with a pen" to r/AdviceAnimals with the Austin Powers screen cap and the caption "I also / like to live dangerously"1. That post picked up more than 2,300 upvotes and 540 comments over the next three months and became the reference template that later submissions copied3.

How It Spread

The template jumped platforms fast. On December 29th, 2012, 9gag user johndonohoe11 stacked a photo of someone touching a "Do not touch" sign above Kcazaa's macro, and the combined post pulled in around 25,000 upvotes and 8,500 Facebook shares within two months4. A dedicated Facebook page called "I also like to live dangerously" launched on January 16th, 2013, collecting user photos of people brazenly ignoring signs and pairing them with the Austin Powers image5.

Back on Reddit, the format kept generating hits. On February 21st, 2013, AvengerAdam posted a version about overshooting the fast-forward button on a DVR, which climbed past 18,800 upvotes and 225 comments in 17 days6. On March 10th, 2013, iDanglle followed up with a macro about trying to catch a legendary Pokemon without saving the game first, hitting more than 450 upvotes in its first 24 hours3.

Aggregation followed the virality. By March 2013, the "Dangerously Austin Powers" page on Quickmeme had gathered more than 990 user submissions, cementing the image as a standard advice-animal template alongside We've Got a Badass Over Here and Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn7.

How to Use This Meme

The template is a two-line caption over the Austin Powers close-up. Line one is typically a mildly rule-breaking or trivially reckless behavior ("When I skip the intro without hitting the skip button," "When I go 3 mph over the speed limit"). Line two is a variant of "I also like to live dangerously" or "I too like to live dangerously"1. The humor comes from how tiny the risk in line one is compared to the swagger of the punchline.

Frequently Asked Questions