Me Showing My Mom a Funny Meme — Winnie the Pooh reading a piece of paper with a blank expression

Me Showing My Mom a Funny Meme

2019image macroclassic

Published September 6, 2026

Me Showing My Mom a Funny Meme is a 2019 participatory joke where people film their mothers reacting to a Winnie the Pooh image macro, hoping mom will unconsciously mimic the bear's squinting face. The bit jumped from Reddit to Twitter and Instagram in under two weeks and became one of the defining wholesome meta-memes of that spring.

participatory video memes wholesome memes challenge memes image macro memes subreddit origin memes

Overview

Me Showing My Mom a Funny Meme is built around a single image macro of Winnie the Pooh squinting at a piece of paper, captioned with the title phrase1. The gag only fully works when the setup goes meta: kids hand the phone to their mom, film her reaction, and post the clip when she unwittingly pulls the exact squint the cartoon bear is doing2.

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The format has two layers. There's the still image itself, which reads like any standard reaction macro, and then there's the video challenge built on top of it, where the punchline is a real mother mirroring Pooh's face without realizing3. Videos in this genre are short, usually shot vertically, and often end with the filmer laughing off-camera as mom leans in, tilts her head, and squints2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Reddit (image macro) / Twitter (viral spread)
Creator
emmperor_zurg
Date
2019

The base image macro was posted on April 13, 2019, by Redditor emmperor_zurg to r/me_irl, where it picked up more than 28,000 upvotes and around 160 comments1. It followed the standard r/me_irl template of a low-effort caption pasted over an existing cartoon still, in this case a screencap of Winnie the Pooh reading a piece of paper with a heavy squint1.

Within about a week, users flipped the joke from a passive image into an active dare, filming their own mothers being handed the meme on a phone3. That shift from static image to participatory video is what turned an ordinary subreddit post into a cross-platform bit.

How It Spread

The video wave took off on April 22, 2019, when Twitter user @kweenngee posted a clip of someone showing their mom the macro. Her tweet pulled in more than 74,000 retweets, 180,000 likes and about 1.37 million views within four days2. The same day, Instagram account @bitch reposted a version of the game, crediting @vivcarvalho7 and @nessamarquezini, and racked up more than 627,000 likes and 4.8 million views in the same four-day window1.

Other Twitter users kept the chain going, including @madd_libb, who posted her own "when you show your mom a meme" clip on April 25, 20194. That same day, BuzzFeed News writer Lauren Strapagiel published a roundup calling the meme "an instant classic" and noting it had already spread across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter meme pages before anyone could pin down a single origin point3. Strapagiel's piece also flagged that the joke was going "full circle," with people recreating just the squint themselves rather than filming their moms3.

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How to Use This Meme

The common convention is to open the Winnie the Pooh macro on your phone, hand it to your mother without explanation, and film her face as she reads it. The punchline typically lands when she leans in and squints in a way that matches the cartoon. Some users skip the parent entirely and just film themselves recreating the squint, which was already a documented variant by late April 20193.

Frequently Asked Questions