What is Lex Luthor Took Forty Cakes?

It's an illustration from the 1978 Super Dictionary that shows Lex Luthor stealing a cart of forty cakes, later recycled as an image board meme.

Where did Lex Luthor Took Forty Cakes come from?

The panel comes from The Super Dictionary published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in July 1978, and first surfaced online as a YTMND page uploaded September 8, 2005.

What does Lex Luthor Took Forty Cakes mean?

It's a nonsense joke about a supervillain committing a petty theft, drawn in earnest for a children's vocabulary entry about the number 40.

How do you use Lex Luthor Took Forty Cakes?

Share the image with a caption paraphrasing the '40 cakes, that's as many as four tens' line, or post the 'kek' remix on image boards for a laugh reaction.

Is Lex Luthor Took Forty Cakes still popular?

It holds classic status as one of the earliest recurring joke images of the pre-Reddit forum era, and the kek variant kept it alive on image boards through the 2010s.

Lex Luthor Took Forty Cakes

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Published September 5, 2026

Lex Luthor Took Forty Cakes is a panel scanned from a 1978 DC-licensed children's book called The Super Dictionary, showing the supervillain sprinting away with a cart of cakes. Rediscovered on YTMND in 2005, the absurd illustration turned into one of the earliest recurring image jokes of the pre-Reddit forum era and later mutated into the popular 'kek' image board variant.

ytmnd memes dc comics memes absurdist humor memes late 2000s memes catchphrase memes

Overview

The image originates from The Super Dictionary, a 1978 educational reference book that used DC characters to demonstrate vocabulary words3. In the panel tied to the number 'forty', Lex Luthor is drawn wheeling a cart piled with cakes, an image whose deadpan children's-book framing became the whole gag for later remixers2.

The meme is the image itself, usually posted with a paraphrased caption reading something like 'When no one was looking, Lex Luthor took forty cakes. That's as many as four tens. And that's terrible.' A later variation swapped 'cakes' for the phonetically identical 'kek', turning the panel into a running gag on image boards once 'kek' overtook older laughter terms in the late 2000s1.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

The Super Dictionary (print source) / YTMND (viral spread)

Date

2005

The Super Dictionary was published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in July 1978 and organized more than 4,000 words into example sentences starring Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash and other DC heroes3. The Luthor cake panel sat inside the book unnoticed by internet culture for nearly three decades. The earliest known digital resurfacing was a YTMND page uploaded on September 8, 2005, which put the illustration back into wider circulation1.

How It Spread

Through 2006 and 2007 the scan hopped across the early social web. Digg users pushed it under the headline 'Oh No Lex Luthor stole 40 cakes'2 and Collegehumor added it to its picture archive4. A 4chan thread on /co/ (post 1249916) kept it moving through the board circuit3.

In May 2009, Nextround ran a post titled 'Lex Luthor Stole Forty Cakes' that treated the image as an already familiar joke, with commenters riffing on the wildness of 1970s counting books5. Recurring threads about the panel appeared on SuperheroHype, World of Warcraft general chat and Ebaum's World during the same era3. Once 'kek' displaced older internet laughter slang, users rebuilt the caption with the homophone in place of 'cake', giving the panel a second run through image board culture1.

How to Use This Meme

The typical format is to post the illustration with a caption riffing on Luthor's cake theft, often quoting a variant of 'That's as many as four tens. And that's terrible' to play up the paraphrased educational tone of the original book2. The kek variant swaps 'cake' for 'kek' and works as a shorthand laugh reaction on image boards1.