Kim Jong-un in glasses and black suit gesturing while speaking at a podium

Kim Jong-un

2011meme personalityclassic

Published September 4, 2026

Kim Jong-un became North Korea's supreme leader in December 2011 after his father's death, and his awkward public image and bizarre state propaganda quickly turned him into a target for online mockery. Within a year, 4chan users hijacked Time's Person of the Year poll to crown him the winner while The Onion's satirical 'Sexiest Man Alive' article fooled Chinese state media into publishing it as real news, kicking off nearly a decade of viral moments that made him one of the internet's most parodied world leaders.

political satire memes hoax memes photoshop memes 4chan memes unwilling celebrity memes

Overview

The Kim Jong-un meme runs on the gap between his cartoonish public image, the round face, blunt haircut, ill-fitting suits, and the grim reality of the country he runs. Common formats include photoshopped images playing on his physical appearance, image macros about missiles and gulags, and fake headlines styled after the fawning press releases of North Korea's state news agency KCNA3. Urban Dictionary entries from the early 2010s already treated him as shorthand for 'nukes plus lunch mix-ups,' with one popular definition joking that he 'mistakes lunch for launch'7.

What gives the character staying power is that reality keeps handing meme material back to the internet. Chinese state media once ran a 55-photo slideshow celebrating him as the world's sexiest man after mistaking a satirical article for journalism2. 4chan users organized to spell out a slur about North Korean prison camps using the initials of Time's Person of the Year candidates6. A Seth Rogen movie about assassinating him triggered a real cyberattack on Sony Pictures8. Each event fed back into the meme, layering new jokes onto an already absurd character.

Origin & Background

Platform
News media / 4chan (viral spread)
Date
2011

Before succeeding his father in December 2011, Kim was almost invisible outside North Korea, with only one confirmed childhood photograph in wide circulation8. His public elevation as 'great successor to the revolutionary cause of Juche' by state news agency KCNA gave the English-speaking internet a fresh target the moment coverage began. Early jokes leaned on his youth, his weight, and the theatrical propaganda titles being applied to a leader most Western viewers had never seen speak.

The first big meme moment arrived on November 14, 2012, when The Onion published a satirical article naming Kim its 'Sexiest Man Alive for the year 2012,' calling him a 'Pyongyang-bred heartthrob' with a 'devastatingly handsome, round face'1. The piece was deadpan enough that international outlets quickly mistook it for real, and the ensuing confusion, rather than the article itself, is what pushed Kim into meme territory.

How It Spread

The Onion hoax broke into the mainstream on November 27, 2012, when the online version of China's Communist Party newspaper People's Daily republished the story as straight news, complete with a 55-page photo slideshow of Kim on horseback, waving at parades, and touring facilities with his wife3. The Los Angeles Times reported the mix-up the same day, noting the People's Daily quoted the Onion's description of Kim's 'devastatingly handsome, round face' in a headline treating the satire as fact2. The Atlantic pointed out that South Korea's Korea Times had also picked up the story, and The Onion updated its article with a mock tag thanking 'our friends at the People's Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion'14.

While that story was still going viral, 4chan's /b/ board opened a second front. Starting November 26, 2012, users organized 'Operation: Kim Jong Un for Time's Person of the Year,' sharing Pastebin VBS scripts and a Java-based auto-voter to stuff Time's online reader poll5. By December 3, Kim had passed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi to take the top spot with roughly 2.9 million votes6. The prank sharpened over the following days as anons manipulated the poll to spell 'KJUGASCHAMBERS' with the first letter of the top fourteen candidates' names, a reference to North Korea's Camp 22 gulag6. Time's editors ultimately picked the winner themselves, but the vote-rigging campaign became the meme's origin story on Reddit and 4chan for years afterward6.

The character kept resurfacing in bigger and stranger contexts. On June 11, 2014, Sony Pictures released the first teaser for The Interview, a comedy in which James Franco and Seth Rogen play journalists recruited by the CIA to kill Kim, and the trailer racked up over five million views in two weeks9. That November, the hacker group Guardians of Peace breached Sony Pictures and leaked tens of terabytes of internal data, an attack later widely attributed to North Korea in retaliation for the film8. Then on September 19, 2017, President Donald Trump used a UN speech to call Kim 'Rocket Man' on a suicide mission, and Kim's KCNA-issued reply two days later called Trump a 'dotard,' an archaic English insult that instantly trended and briefly crashed several online dictionaries8.

How to Use This Meme

The Kim Jong-un meme typically works through visual contrast, pairing an official-looking KCNA-style photo of Kim inspecting factories, farms, or missile tests with an absurd caption that treats the mundane subject as a matter of world-historic importance. A common convention borrows the flowery honorifics used by state media ('great successor,' 'outstanding leader') and applies them to trivial things. Image macros often photoshop him next to oversized food or missiles, while text-based jokes lean on the 'lunch versus launch' pun and dictator tropes cataloged in early Urban Dictionary entries7.

Frequently Asked Questions