Pretzels Is the Same

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Published September 23, 2026

Pretzels Is the Same is an exploitable catchphrase and image macro pulled from a 2013 episode of The Eric Andre Show, in which comedian Hannibal Buress deadpans the line while sampling pretzel brands. Tumblr users turned the moment into a comparison format that spread through fandom circles for years.

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Overview

Pretzels Is the Same is a comparison meme built around a short bit from The Eric Andre Show where guest Hannibal Buress tastes several pretzel brands, shrugs, and mumbles "What is this segment? Pretzels is the same?"1 Editors pair the screenshot or a GIF of the moment with side-by-side images of two things that look, sound, or function nearly identically, captioning the pair "X is the same."2

The format flexes across fandom targets: anime protagonists, art movements, band members, cartoon characters, and celebrity lookalikes2. Part of the joke is Buress's flat delivery, which reads as bored resignation rather than a punchline, so the meme works best when the two compared items are only funny once you notice they really are indistinguishable.

Origin & Background

Platform
Adult Swim (source clip) / Tumblr (viral spread)
Date
2013

The source clip aired on October 10th, 2013, during a segment on Adult Swim's The Eric Andre Show in which Hannibal Buress reviews grocery-store pretzel brands and concludes with the line that named the meme1. The scene was uploaded to YouTube the same year and became the reference video most editors pull frames and GIFs from1.

The original TV moment was not itself a meme. The meme format emerged months later on Tumblr, when users started grafting the catchphrase onto unrelated comparison posts2. The identity of the first editor to caption a side-by-side with "pretzels is the same" is not confirmed in the source record.

How It Spread

The earliest documented use as a comparison caption came on May 25th, 2014, when Tumblr user gamera7 reblogged childhood and adult photos of Buress himself looking nearly identical and captioned the pair "pretzels is the same"2. A GIF set of the original scene posted by Tumblr user ghoulgoblin520 on December 28th, 2014, pushed the reference into wider Tumblr circulation and picked up over 124,000 notes2.

Over the next few years the template got picked up by fandom blogs. A photoset by Tumblr user ohdoubleyoo comparing the lead characters of several sports anime racked up more than 23,000 notes, and a post by eggzaki applied it to abstract painter Jackson Pollock's canvases, reaching over 22,000 notes2. The format stayed largely a Tumblr artifact rather than crossing to Twitter or Reddit in the same volume.

The meme is still recognizable to Eric Andre Show fans and older Tumblr users, and the GIF is still reblogged in comparison threads, though it has not seen a major mainstream revival since the mid-2010s Tumblr peak2.

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