Lord Marquaad E — Deep-fried image of Markiplier's face on Mark Zuckerberg at Congress with a large letter E overlay.

Lord Marquaad E

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Published September 5, 2026

Lord Marquaad E is a deep-fried image mashing YouTuber Markiplier's face onto Lord Farquaad from Shrek, captioned with a single letter 'E' in Impact font. What started as a stray 2015 Twitter photoshop mutated into a Tumblr deep-fry in 2018 and blew up into one of the defining absurdist meme templates of that year.

deep fried memes absurdist humor memes face swap memes shrek 2018 memes

Overview

Lord Marquaad E, also called Lord Farquaad / Markiplier E, is built from three visual layers glued together in Photoshop: Lord Farquaad's hair and bald pate from Shrek, Markiplier's grinning face and glasses, and, in later edits, Mark Zuckerberg's body from his April 2018 Congressional testimony1. The whole composite is deep-fried, meaning it's cranked through filters until the JPEG turns crunchy and oversaturated, then stamped with a single Impact-font 'E' that carries no punchline at all.

The joke is that there isn't one. Daily Dot writer Ellen Cushing called it 'truly, nothing, and that's what makes it great,' framing the image as an emblem of the surreal, deliberately incoherent style that dominated meme feeds in early 20181. Users on r/deepfriedmemes openly admitted they didn't get it, which was part of the appeal1. The face is also swapped onto other characters, most notably Mr. Incredible with the letter 'M' as a running gag about eventually spelling out 'e=mc^2' with meme characters2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter (source image) / Tumblr (deep-fried viral spread)
Key People
Cyndago, photo-frier
Date
2018

Source image: The Markiplier-on-Farquaad photoshop was first posted on May 25th, 2015 by Twitter user and YouTuber Cyndago2. It circulated as a straightforward gag mashup, in line with the 'Shrek Wazowski' style of Shrek-plus-random-celebrity edits that were common in 2014 and 20151.

Earliest known meme form: The deep-fried, 'E'-captioned version that became the actual meme surfaced on February 15th, 2018, when the Tumblr blog photo-frier reposted the image drenched in distortion and topped with the letter 'E'2. That post pulled in 728 notes on Tumblr and became the reference point everyone else copied2.

How It Spread

Reddit picked it up in April 2018. On April 11th, the image was slotted into a 'Memes Then, Memes Now' post on r/dankmemes that hit 3,884 upvotes, and a subsequent r/me_irl post cleared 7,0002. Two days later, on April 13th, an edit that grafted the Farquaad-Markiplier head onto Mark Zuckerberg's body during his Congressional hearing landed on r/deepfriedmemes and pulled over 15,000 upvotes, reaching Reddit's r/all front page1.

April 23rd, 2018 was the format's peak day: the image was folded into the 'Why Is Millennial Humor So Weird?' template on r/dankmemes for more than 23,000 upvotes, one of the posts most responsible for pushing that meta-template into wider rotation2. Confused onlookers filed at least two 'what am I looking at' threads on r/OutOfTheLoop the same month2. The Daily Dot ran an explainer titled 'What's the E meme?' on May 2nd, 20181, and on May 26th PewDiePie referenced the meme in a video that racked up more than 4.2 million views3.

The format kept mutating through June. On June 6th, r/dankmemes user thezerg505000 posted Markiplier's face grafted onto Mr. Incredible with the letter 'M,' which hit around 6,700 upvotes and kicked off the 'letter memes will eventually spell e=mc^2' bit that ran for weeks after2.

How to Use This Meme

The template is typically a heavily deep-fried image, high saturation, JPEG noise, added grain, with Markiplier's face pasted onto a bald cartoon or public figure and a single capital letter in Impact font floating on top. The common convention is that the letter is meaningless. 'E' is the canonical version; swapping in other letters (M for Mr. Incredible, C for Cookie Monster) is the standard variation.

Frequently Asked Questions