Neil deGrasse Tyson Reaction — Line-art drawing of Neil deGrasse Tyson with both hands raised in reaction

Neil deGrasse Tyson Reaction

2011reaction imageclassic

Published September 8, 2026

A rage comic reaction face traced from a 2011 Big Think interview clip where astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson throws up his hands while explaining Isaac Newton's calculus breakthrough1. Redditors paired the drawing with the caption "Watch out guys, we're dealing with a badass over here" to mock braggy posts, and by 2012 the same illustration jumped to the Spanish-speaking web as the sarcastic "Ay si, ay si" macro.

rage comics reaction memes sarcasm memes celebrity reaction memes subreddit origin memes

Overview

The face is a simple black-and-white outline traced from a freeze-frame of Tyson leaning back with both palms out, an unimpressed pose he pulls while describing how Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus before turning 261. Rage comic artists on subreddits like /r/f7u12 slotted that panel into strips where a character brags about something trivial, usually smoking weed, drinking, or working out, with the Tyson pose landing as the sarcastic clap-back3.

The captioned image macro version, sometimes shortened to "Watch out, we got a badass over here," works on its own as a reply to any post that reads as showing off. Its Spanish-language counterpart "Ay si, ay si" (roughly "Oh yes, oh yes") uses the exact same drawing to deliver an identical eye-roll2.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube (source clip) / Reddit (viral spread)
Creator
Hippopoptimus_Prime
Date
2011

The source clip is a Big Think interview titled "Neil deGrasse Tyson on Living and Longevity," uploaded to YouTube on June 3, 20111. The specific gesture happens when Tyson gets to Newton's teenage calculus discovery and throws his hands up in mock defensiveness. About two months later, on August 25, 2011, an animated GIF of the moment was posted to the r/trees subreddit under the title "when asked if i smoke weed often," and user Hippopoptimus_Prime replied to the thread with the first rage comic redraw of the face3.

How It Spread

The rage face caught on across Reddit that fall. On October 23, 2011, Redditor Onlyhereforthelaughs posted a full Tyson rage comic to /r/f7u12, and two days later Redditor GiggleAtTheGoatse pinned it onto a Facebook screenshot reading "Smokin Weed" with the caption "Watch out guys, we're dealing with a badass over here"3. Redditor fairlydeadfellow trimmed the line to "Watch out, we got a badass over here" on November 7, and that shorter version stuck as the default caption.

By January 2012, the drawing had crossed over to Spanish-language meme sites, where the caption "Ay si, ay si" turned it into a general-purpose sarcasm face. A Meme Generator page for "Ay Si" went up on January 18, and a Facebook page under the same name pulled about 150,000 likes over the following year3. On December 23, 2012, the Spanish rage comic blog Cuánto Cabrón published a photo of a real-world bar sign reading "Ay si, ay si / El bar del meme" ("Meme's Bar," translated from Spanish), which drew more than 3,400 upvotes over the next two months2.

How to Use This Meme

Common convention is to drop the face, either the rage panel or the captioned macro, as a reply to a status update, tweet, or comment that reads as bragging about something small. The caption "Watch out guys, we're dealing with a badass over here" (or the shorter "we got a badass over here") is the standard pairing3. Spanish speakers typically swap in "Ay si, ay si" over the same drawing for the same sarcastic effect2.

Frequently Asked Questions