# Running Officer Earl Running Officer Earl is a reaction image pulled from the 2009 animated film Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, showing a blurry, wide-eyed Officer Earl Devereaux charging straight at the camera. Recirculated on iFunny and Reddit in spring 2019, the shot became a shorthand for anything, or anyone, coming to get you and turned into a defining dankmemes reaction image of April 2019. ## Origin The source clip comes from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, the Sony Pictures Animation film that premiered in the United States on September 18, 2009[1]. In the scene the image is pulled from, Officer Earl Devereaux sprints after protagonist Flint Lockwood to arrest him, and the animation briefly renders Earl as a blurry, determined blur charging into frame[2]. The reaction-image use is much later. According to Know Your Meme, iFunny user Sylf posted a close-up of the running Earl shot on March 11, 2019, where it pulled in over 2,000 likes within a month, marking the earliest documented use of the frame as a standalone reaction[2]. The film's animators created the character; the person who first cropped and reposted the frame as a meme is not confirmed. - **Platform:** Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (source) / iFunny + Reddit (viral spread) - **Creator:** Unknown - **Date:** 2019 ## Overview Running Officer Earl is a cropped, motion-blurred frame of police officer Earl Devereaux from the Sony animated film Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs[1]. In the shot, Earl is sprinting directly toward the camera with a locked-in, wide-eyed expression, an image posters started using in April 2019 to represent being chased, whether by a person, a bill, a responsibility, or an intrusive thought[2]. The format is a straight image macro. Posters caption the picture with whatever is doing the chasing, casting Earl as the pursuer bearing down on the viewer or on some helpless subject in the caption. Because the source frame is blurry and tightly cropped on Earl's face, the joke works even at thumbnail size, which helped it travel on mobile-first feeds like iFunny and the Reddit app[2]. ## How It Spread The image jumped from iFunny to Reddit at the start of April 2019. On April 1, 2019, Redditor Cactux3000 posted the close-up to /r/WOSH, where it collected more than 600 upvotes in four days[2]. The next day, on April 2, Redditor CooperG208 shared the image with a caption to /r/MemeEconomy and noted that it had been circulating in /r/dankmemes, drawing over 220 upvotes[2]. The format broke out on April 3, 2019, when Redditor 360Weeny posted a captioned Running Officer Earl meme to /r/dankmemes and cleared 17,700 upvotes in two days[2]. In the days that followed, more posts using the frame filled /r/dankmemes, cementing Officer Earl's blurry sprint as a go-to April 2019 reaction image on the subreddit[2]. Specific viral posts, including CooperG208's /r/MemeEconomy submission and 360Weeny's /r/dankmemes hit, were documented by Know Your Meme but their exact URLs are not reproduced here. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Running Officer Earl? It's a reaction image of Officer Earl Devereaux from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs shown as a blurry, determined figure sprinting straight at the camera, used online to represent something or someone chasing you[2]. ### Where did Running Officer Earl come from? The image is a frame from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, the 2009 Sony animated film in which Earl chases protagonist Flint Lockwood[1]. It started being used as a reaction image on iFunny in March 2019[2]. ### What does Running Officer Earl mean? Posters use the picture to represent an inescapable pursuer, whether literal (a cop, a person) or metaphorical (a bill, a deadline, a consequence), with the caption naming what is doing the chasing[2]. ### How do you use Running Officer Earl? The common convention is to slap a caption on the image labelling Earl as whatever is coming for the viewer, then post it as a reply or standalone joke, the way it was used in the April 2019 /r/dankmemes wave[2]. ### Is Running Officer Earl still popular? Its viral peak was on Reddit in early April 2019, when /r/dankmemes posts using the frame pulled tens of thousands of upvotes[2]. It's still recognised as a classic 2019 reaction image but is no longer at that peak volume. ## References 1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatballs_(film)]() 2. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/running-officer-earl]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/officer-earl-running Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library