Overly Suave IT Guy — Young man in gray suit at white laptop with smug sideways glance on red starburst background

Overly Suave IT Guy

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Published September 20, 2026

Overly Suave IT Guy is an advice animal image macro that hit Reddit in October 2013, matching a stock photo of a man at a laptop with pick-up lines built around IT jargon. Redditor j0brien's debut post about F5 shortcuts drew tens of thousands of upvotes in a day, kicking off a short burst of tech flirtation memes that got picked up by BuzzFeed and Mashable within 48 hours.

advice animals tech humor memes stock photo exploitables double entendre memes subreddit origin memes

Overview

The format pairs a stock photograph of a bespectacled man hunched over a laptop with bold white text delivering flirtations wrapped in IT diagnostics, hardware slang, and browser shortcuts. Punchlines lean on Trojans, backups, F5 refreshes, and permission access, framing the character as a geeky pick-up artist in the same lineage as Dat Ash, Priority Peter, and Pickup Line Scientist2.

The tone is playful and self-aware, aimed at anyone who has ever fixed a family member's printer. Every entry follows the same template: laptop guy, tech-adjacent wordplay, romantic overtones. The comedy depends on how tightly the setup and punchline map an IT term onto a compliment or come-on.

Origin & Background

Platform
Reddit (/r/AdviceAnimals)
Creator
Redditor j0brien
Date
2013

Redditor j0brien launched the format on October 24, 2013 with a post titled 'Introducing: Overly Suave IT Guy' on /r/AdviceAnimals. The debut image complimented a woman's figure with a pun on F5, the keyboard shortcut for reloading a webpage, and cleared more than 28,100 upvotes and 690 comments in its first 24 hours2. A May 2012 /r/funny post by THENOOBLER titled 'Oh. . . you Bill Gates,' which used a Bill Gates photograph and a similar risque pun, predates the format name but foreshadowed the same humor.

How It Spread

Copycats moved within hours of j0brien's post. Redditor kevted5085 dropped a 'Trojan' variant that treated the malware term as a double entendre for the condom brand, hauling in about 21,900 upvotes and 270 comments over the next 20 hours on /r/AdviceAnimals. Two hours after that, maximum_Cman posted a version about granting a woman 'access permissions to the D,' which cleared 3,900 upvotes and 45 comments on the same subreddit2.

Mainstream aggregators caught up fast. BuzzFeed ran a compilation later on October 24, and FunnyJunk plus Mashable followed on October 251. Mashable's writeup called IT guys 'the underrated hotties of the universe' and joked about hiring the man in the photo, cementing the format's brief late-2013 moment1.

Timeline

2012-05-28

Redditor THENOOBLER posts 'Oh. . . you Bill Gates' to /r/funny, an early precursor pairing a Microsoft founder photo with a risque tech pun.

2013-10-24

Redditor j0brien submits 'Introducing: Overly Suave IT Guy' to /r/AdviceAnimals, using an F5 refresh pun and pulling 28,100 upvotes in 24 hours.

2013-10-24

Redditors kevted5085 and maximum_Cman post 'Trojan' and 'access permissions to the D' variants, each racking up thousands of upvotes the same day.

2013-10-24

BuzzFeed publishes a compilation of the best examples.

2013-10-25

Mashable and FunnyJunk cover the format, with Mashable dubbing IT guys 'the underrated hotties of the universe.'

How to Use This Meme

To make one, drop the laptop-guy photograph into an advice-animal generator and add two lines of white text. The setup typically flirts at a woman while the punchline swaps in an IT term like backup, ping, port, uptime, or admin privileges to twist the compliment into a tech pun1.

Frequently Asked Questions