Stephen Hawking

2009personality / reaction memeclassic

Published September 29, 2026

Stephen Hawking was the English theoretical physicist behind A Brief History of Time whose synthesized voice, wheelchair, and cameo appearances made him one of the most memed scientists on the internet. After his death on March 14, 2018, tribute posts, photoshops and Kirstie Alley's widely mocked "you had a good go at it" tweet sparked a fresh wave of jokes across Reddit and Twitter.

celebrity reaction memesdeath hoax tragedy memesintelligence memespseudo intellectual memeswholesome memes

Overview

Stephen Hawking was a real physicist first and a meme subject second, but the internet turned his synthesized DECtalk voice, motorized wheelchair and wry public persona into shorthand for pure genius, usually deployed in wholesome science jokes rather than punching-down ones1. His A Brief History of Time made him a household name in 1988, and the same book became a running visual gag in dorm rooms and reaction images decades later2.

The meme version of Hawking shows up in a few recurring formats. There are the sincere "smartest guy in the room" edits pairing him with Einstein or Newton, the fan-remix songs built around his voice clips, and the ironic image macros where his likeness is grafted into unrelated pop-culture scenes3. After his death on March 14, 2018, a second layer appeared: tribute photoshops, wheelchair-ascending-to-space edits and jokes about him dying on Albert Einstein's birthday4.

The humor mostly works because Hawking himself leaned into pop culture, taking cameos on The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Big Bang Theory, so remixing him rarely feels mean3. Urban Dictionary entries note he was a "pop culture icon" as much as a scientist, which is why the meme material keeps recirculating1.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube (Symphony of Science) / Reddit (viral tributes)
Date
2009

Hawking was born January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England, diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21, and adopted the Equalizer speech program in 1986 that gave him the robotic voice everyone associates with him5. That voice became the first true meme-adjacent artifact: on November 9, 2009, musician John Boswell of Symphony of Science released "A Glorious Dawn," auto-tuning clips of Hawking from the Stephen Hawking's Universe TV series into a viral tribute song5. The video introduced a younger internet audience to Hawking as a remixable figure rather than just a science celebrity.

A second origin point was the March 30, 2011 Epic Rap Battles of History episode pitting Hawking against Albert Einstein, uploaded by Nice Peter, which passed 102 million views over the next five years and cemented Hawking's status as internet character shorthand for "the smart one"5. The post-death meme wave has a specific catalyst too: Hawking died on March 14, 2018, and hours later actress Kirstie Alley tweeted a black-and-white photo of him with the caption "You had a good go at it..thanks for your input," which was quickly mocked as an accidentally hilarious understatement6.

How It Spread

Hawking's transition from public intellectual to full internet character happened in stages across YouTube and Reddit. After Symphony of Science and the Epic Rap Battles video established the remix template, TED released his "Questioning the Universe" talk on April 4, 2008, giving remixers a clean high-quality clip pool5. On July 16, 2014, Redditor imjustadude90 posted a multi-pane image of Hawking and John Oliver to r/funny that pulled in over 12,000 upvotes, one of the earliest big Hawking image-macro hits on the subreddit7.

Hawking then went interactive. On July 27, 2015, he did a Science AMA on r/science that gathered over 10,900 upvotes and 8,900 comments before archival, giving Reddit a direct-quote reservoir to screenshot into memes8. On January 27, 2016, the IQIM Caltech YouTube channel posted a Paul Rudd sketch where Hawking plays "quantum chess," which passed 1.7 million views in three months and got re-shared for its deadpan comedy beat5. That same year he joined the Chinese platform Sina Weibo on April 12 and hit a million followers within 48 hours, with his greeting post picking up over 500,000 likes5.

The biggest single-day spike came with his death. On March 14, 2018, Hawking topped Twitter's trending topics and multiple tribute and joke threads hit the front pages of r/news, r/science, r/space and r/worldnews9. Redditor Toxicxxfuzion's post about Hawking dying on Einstein's birthday landed on r/nevertellmetheodds, and r/dankmemes filled with photoshop tributes the same day5. Kirstie Alley's terse tweet drew coverage from Daily Mail, Daily Dot and Wonderwall, with users like @i_zzzzzz calling it "the funniest thing anyone has ever said about someone who just died" and @DavidFarrier calling it the best Hawking obituary6.

How to Use This Meme

Common conventions include pairing Hawking with other physics icons like Einstein or Newton for "three greatest minds" jokes, dubbing his synthesized voice over unlikely audio, or photoshopping his wheelchair into pop-culture scenes. Post-2018 tribute edits typically show him leaving the chair to walk or fly, usually captioned with an in-joke about relativity or with Einstein's birthday coincidence4.

Frequently Asked Questions