What is My Fatass Thought This Was Fried Chicken?

A phrasal template where someone captions a photo of a non-food object with "My fatass thought this was [food]," framing their own hunger as the reason for the mix-up.

Where did My Fatass Thought This Was Fried Chicken come from?

It traces to a May 12, 2014, tweet by @ASHAtheCreator about a litter of brown, curly-haired puppies that looked like fried chicken.

What does My Fatass Thought This Was Fried Chicken mean?

It is a self-deprecating joke about momentarily reading an inedible object as food, with the "fatass" bit exaggerating the speaker's appetite.

How do you use My Fatass Thought This Was Fried Chicken?

Post a photo of something that resembles a snack, or subvert the setup by pairing the opening clause with something that does not look like food at all, as @joeygllghr did with a Lego comparison in 2018.

Is My Fatass Thought This Was Fried Chicken still popular?

The template is a long-running classic that keeps appearing, though by 2018 it was already seen as overused and ripe for subversion. A viral 2017 air mattress tweet sits as its biggest single post.

My Fatass Thought This Was Fried Chicken

2014phrasal templateclassic

Published November 10, 2026

My Fatass Thought This Was Fried Chicken began as a May 12, 2014, tweet from @ASHAtheCreator, who joked that a litter of brown, curly-haired puppies looked like a plate of fried chicken1. The self-deprecating caption hardened into a phrasal template for photos of mundane objects that resemble food, and by 2017 a tweet comparing an air mattress to an ice cream sandwich drew over 100,000 likes2.

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Overview

A typical post pairs a photo with the stem "My fatass thought this was [food item]," turning everyday objects into near-food doubles. Puppies read as drumsticks, broken car wash foam reads as soft serve, white bell peppers read as chicken nuggets3. The humor sits in the opening clause, where the poster leans on their own hunger as the reason for the mix-up.

By the late 2010s, My Fatass Thought This Was Fried Chicken shifted tone. Writers began swapping the food punchline for something odd or unrelated, like @joeygllghr's October 2018 tweet comparing a person in a yellow face mask to a Lego figure5. Some posts stopped pretending the image looked like food at all, and the opening clause worked as its own setup regardless of what followed6.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Twitter (origin) / Facebook (viral spread)

Creator

@ASHAtheCreator

Date

2014

@ASHAtheCreator posted the earliest documented version on May 12, 2014, pairing a photo of brown, curly-haired puppies with the line "Bruh, my fat ass thought these puppies was some nice ass fried chicken"1. The tweet picked up over 2,000 likes across the following decade and set the stem that later posters copied nearly word for word3.

How It Spread

On October 17, 2016, the Facebook page "Explore Talent, Acting and Modeling" posted a shot of broken car wash foam captioned "My fatass thought this was ice cream…"4. The image drew past 4,000 reactions and moved the joke off Twitter for the first well-documented time.

The biggest single hit landed on May 4, 2017, when @courtneymnoel quote-tweeted a photo of an air mattress with "My fat ass thought this was an ice cream sandwich..," reaching past 100,000 likes2. That post gave the template its clearest viral benchmark and encouraged a wave of near-identical riffs.

By 2018, the stem read as overused and possibly as engagement bait, which opened room for subverted entries3. @joeygllghr's Lego-person tweet from October 5, 2018, ran the opening clause with a non-food punchline5. On November 18, 2020, @lilsamsquanch66 posted white bell peppers that could easily have been called teeth but captioned them "My fat ass thought this was chicken nuggets 😂," collecting over 1,500 likes6.

Timeline

2014-05-12

@ASHAtheCreator tweets the earliest known version, comparing curly-haired puppies to fried chicken[1].

2016-10-17

Facebook page Explore Talent posts a broken car wash foam photo with the "ice cream" variant, drawing over 4,000 reactions[4].

2017-05-04

@courtneymnoel's air mattress / ice cream sandwich tweet crosses 100,000 likes, the template's biggest documented hit[2].

2018-10-05

@joeygllghr swaps the food punchline for a Lego figure, one of the first clear subversions[5].

2020-11-18

@lilsamsquanch66 posts white bell peppers with a chicken nuggets caption, skipping the obvious teeth comparison[6].