If You Know What I Mean

2012reaction imageclassic

Published August 31, 2026

If You Know What I Mean is a rage comic face built from a still of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean, used to flag a sexual innuendo or double entendre in a post. It broke out on 9gag in late January 2012 and quickly became the go-to reaction image for lampshading a dirty joke online1.

Overview

If You Know What I Mean pairs a vectorized still of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean, eyebrows raised and mouth slightly pursed, with the caption "if you know what I mean"1. The face is dropped at the end of a post or image macro to signal a sexual double entendre the reader is supposed to catch, a trick TV Tropes files under the "Lampshaded Double Entendre" trope2.

Though it started as a rage face, the character is often used the same way as reactions like You Don't Say? or We've Got a Badass Over Here, sitting in the final panel of a vertical rage comic to punctuate the joke1. The phrase itself is much older than the image, with Urban Dictionary entries defining it as a "way to make a statement 'dirty'" going back to 20033.

Origin & Background

Platform
9gag (rage face) / Urban Dictionary (phrase)
Creator
aldik101
Date
2012

The Mr. Bean version of the gag first showed up on 9gag on January 28th, 2012, when user aldik101 posted a screen capture from the 2007 comedy film Mr. Bean's Holiday under the caption "Let's watch a movie, if you know what I mean"1. The source frame comes from Atkinson's performance in the film, whose original trailer footage is preserved on YouTube4.

Later that same day, 9gag user elyo11 posted an extended rage comic that added a cleaned-up vector version of Atkinson's expression paired with the caption "If you know what I mean," which is the template that ended up circulating as the actual reaction face1.

How It Spread

By January 29th, 2012, a blank template of the rage face had been posted to the humor site Meme-O-Rama, and on January 31st a FunnyJunk user going by potatoos ran the face in a vertical rage comic of their own1. On February 1st, 9gag user iv4eto_19_95 posted a poem accompanied by the Mr. Bean rage face titled "If you know what I mean," which pulled in over 56,900 up votes and 7,200 Facebook shares within nine months1.

On February 23rd, 2012, Smosh published a roundup titled "Best Of The 'If You Know What I Mean' Face!" that collected notable examples from the series, helping push it outside the rage comic subculture1. By November 2012 the meme had a dedicated Facebook page with more than 73,000 likes, and Advice Animal versions were showing up on template generators like Quickmeme and MemeGenerator1.

How to Use This Meme

The convention is simple: end a sentence with an unambiguously innocent phrase that also reads as an innuendo, then paste the Mr. Bean face directly under the text or in the final panel of a vertical rage comic. It typically works best when the double meaning is thin enough that most readers would catch it anyway, since the face is doing the "lampshading" work of pointing at the joke2. The phrase alone, without the image, is often used the same way in plain text conversations, a habit Urban Dictionary already documented years before the rage face existed3.

Frequently Asked Questions