Where did No Pomegranates come from?

Twitter user @tdubs23 posted the Snapchat clip on October 11, 2017, and it hit 181,000 likes within five days before being reuploaded to YouTube and Reddit the next day.

What does No Pomegranates mean?

Martino confirmed to International Business Times that the rant was a classroom exercise showing how the word 'no' makes students focus harder on whatever they're told to avoid.

How do you use No Pomegranates?

The audio is typically layered over videos of something being forbidden or dramatically rejected, with the Call of Duty 'No Russian' photoshop from Redditor alienbluedit being the best-known remix.

Is No Pomegranates still popular?

The clip peaked in October 2017 with 1.5 million YouTube views in its first four days and is now treated as a classic absurd-professor moment rather than an active format.

No Pomegranates

Q: What is No Pomegranates?

It's a viral 2017 Snapchat video of Dr. Jane Martino, a psychology professor at Des Moines Area Community College, loudly shouting 'No pomegranates!' at her class during a lesson on the word 'no'.

2017viral videoclassic

Published September 9, 2026

No Pomegranates is a viral 2017 Snapchat clip of Dr. Jane Martino, a psychology professor at Des Moines Area Community College, loudly shouting 'No pomegranates!' at her students during a developmental psychology lesson. The 12-second rant hit Twitter on October 11, 2017 and racked up hundreds of thousands of shares within days, spawning a wave of remixes and reaction edits across Reddit and YouTube.

classroom memes catchphrase memes absurdist humor memes accidental fame memes 2017 memes

Overview

The clip is short and unhinged in a very specific way: a middle-aged professor pacing at the front of a psychology class, jabbing her finger and yelling 'No pomegranates, no pomegranates, no pomegranates!' while a sleepy room half-heartedly chants back. She escalates with 'I don't want them anywhere near here! Am I clear? Say the rule again. No pomegranates!'1. The absurdity of the fruit choice, combined with the professor's total commitment, is the whole joke.

The woman was later identified as Dr. Jane Martino, a psychology professor at Des Moines Area Community College in Iowa1. She told International Business Times that the outburst was actually a planned classroom exercise about the meaninglessness of the word 'no', designed to show how forbidding something makes students think about it more1. That context did not slow the meme down. Edits kept the audio and swapped the visuals for everything from Call of Duty's 'No Russian' mission2 to gym fail compilations reposted on Instagram accounts like @gymfailnation1.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Snapchat / Twitter (viral spread)

Key People

@tdubs23, Dr. Jane Martino

Date

2017

On October 11, 2017, Twitter user @tdubs23 posted a Snapchat recording of Martino's rant with the caption 'No pomegranates'3. The clip had been shot by a student sitting in one of her developmental psychology lectures at DMACC. Within five days the tweet pulled in more than 181,000 likes and 79,300 retweets2. A separate angle of the same rant surfaced on Luke Jonasson's Twitter account, reposted from the Meninist account with the caption 'Best day of class I've had, DMACC pride baby Go Bears'1.

How It Spread

The video jumped platforms fast. On October 12, 2017, YouTuber Jan N reuploaded it to YouTube, where it pulled more than 1.5 million views and 8,100 comments in four days2. That same day Redditor MapleLeafsFan3 posted the clip to /r/youtubehaiku, where it hit roughly 19,700 points at 93% upvoted with 550 comments in the first four days2.

Also on October 12, Twitter user @deeejaaay25 uploaded a second, longer video of Martino running an almost identical bit in a different class4. @deeejaaay25 followed up with an explanation that the exercise was about teaching young children to like or dislike something, which lined up with what Martino later told International Business Times1. IBT's coverage the same day helped push the clip past Twitter's core meme circles and into mainstream news feeds1.

On October 13, 2017, Redditor alienbluedit posted a photoshop to /r/MemeEconomy that pasted Martino's head into the loading screen for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's 'No Russian' mission, retitling it 'No Pomegranates'2. The template kept cycling through 2017 as reaction edits and audio remixes, and the clip is still passed around as a reference for absurd classroom moments.

How to Use This Meme

People typically use the audio as an overreaction template: keep Martino's yelling as the soundtrack and cut to any visual of a thing being forbidden, banned, or dramatically hated. Common conventions include swapping 'pomegranates' with a different noun in caption edits, or pairing the clip with gameplay footage (the Call of Duty 'No Russian' edit is the canonical example)2. Reaction usage often just quotes the line 'No pomegranates!' as a hyperbolic no.