Sphere Cow

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Published September 29, 2026

Sphere Cow is a taxidermy sculpture by Hungarian artist Geza Szollosi that warps a real cow into a near-perfect ball with its hooves, tail and face still poking out. Made in 2009, the image floated around 'crappy taxidermy' blogs for years before Reddit's absurdist subreddits turned it into one of the staple mascots of ironic 2018 shitposting.

absurdist humor memesanimal memesdelayed virality memessubreddit origin memesfine art memes

Overview

The joke of Sphere Cow lives entirely in the image itself: a real taxidermied cow stuffed and stitched into an almost perfect ball, with the hooves, tail, ears and startled face still sticking out where you would expect them1. There is no caption format baked into the piece, which is part of why it worked so well as a nonsensical punchline once absurdist subreddits picked it up2.

On /r/okbuddyretard the sculpture became a recurring character rather than a template, dropped into Who Would Win match-ups against other mascots like Walter Clements and repeatedly compared to the round selfie dog3. The picture also became attached to the older 'spherical cow' physics joke, which imagines a cow as a perfect sphere to make calculations easier, giving the image a second layer of humor for anyone who had sat through an intro physics class4.

Origin & Background

Platform
Art gallery (source) / Reddit (viral spread)
Creator
Geza Szollosi
Date
2009

The sculpture was made by Hungarian artist Geza Szollosi and shown as part of his 'My Pets' body of work at the Scope Miami art fair from December 2nd to 6th, 20091. Szollosi documented the exhibition on his Blogspot, where the photo that later travelled as 'Sphere Cow' first appeared online5.

The image was picked up by the blog crappytaxidermy.com on April 4th, 2010, filed as another entry in its ongoing catalogue of botched or bizarre mounts6. At that point the piece was treated as gallery-adjacent oddity, not a meme.

How It Spread

Sphere Cow did not get much traction online until June 4th, 2015, when a Reddit user posted the photo to /r/WTF under the title 'How now round cow', where it pulled in more than 2,200 upvotes2. Commenters in that thread were the ones who first tied the sculpture to the 'spherical cow' physics joke about oversimplified models, cementing the nickname4.

The piece began working as an actual meme in late 2018. On November 9th, 2018 a post on /r/comedyheaven used Sphere Cow as the nonsensical reveal in the 'When You Tell a Slightly Offensive Joke at the Dinner Table' template and cleared 17,000 upvotes7. A week later, on November 16th, a joke built around the image hit /r/okbuddyretard and gained more than 2,300 points8.

From there the cow settled in as a mascot of that subreddit alongside other 2018 staples like Walter Clements and OK So Basically I'm Monky3. It was pushed further by Who Would Win-style posts pitting the sculpture against the round selfie dog and by side-by-side comparisons between the cow and Walter3.

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