Mona Lisa painting with Surprised Patrick face edited over her head

Surprised Patrick

2008photoshop memeclassic

Published September 30, 2026

Surprised Patrick is a Photoshop meme built from a screenshot of Patrick Star gawking in shock during the 2004 SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. After years as a scattered reaction GIF, the cutout exploded across Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter in March 2013, becoming one of the go-to shocked-face templates of the early 2010s SpongeBob meme wave.

spongebob reaction memes photoshop memes exploitable templates facial expression memes

Overview

Surprised Patrick is a Photoshop template built around a cut-out of Patrick Star wearing an open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression of shock, lifted from a scene in the 2004 SpongeBob SquarePants Movie3. Editors drop the isolated Patrick into unrelated base images, so he appears to be reacting with horror or disbelief to whatever is happening in the picture, whether that is a fistfight, an awkward kiss, a celebrity photo or a bizarre food item1.

The joke is entirely about the reaction, not Patrick himself. Because the cutout can be pasted anywhere, the format works as a visual punchline for any scene where a bystander would reasonably be stunned, and it ran especially hard on absurd, gross or NSFW source images during its 2013 peak2. Animated GIF versions, where Patrick's face is inserted into a moving scene, were common alongside static image edits3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Glitter-Graphics (source GIF) / Reddit / Tumblr (viral spread)
Date
2008

The source frame comes from a moment in the 2004 animated film The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, in which SpongeBob and Patrick sit at the edge of a cliff after losing their Patty Wagon, both wearing exasperated, slack-jawed expressions3. The earliest documented reuse of that expression as a standalone graphic was on January 29th, 2008, when an animated GIF cropped from the scene was uploaded to the graphics site Glitter-Graphics4.

The cutout drifted around as a reaction face for years without a fixed name. On October 23rd, 2011, Tumblr user Lexcali listed the shocked Patrick face at number six in a ranking of the ten best SpongeBob facial expressions5, one of the earliest posts to single it out from the pile of SpongeBob reaction stills.

How It Spread

The format sat mostly dormant until early 2013. On February 9th, 2013, Redditor SeannyOC posted an animated GIF of Surprised Patrick emerging from a chocolate dessert to the /r/pictureswithpatrick subreddit, which pulled in more than 1,100 upvotes within a month3. On March 10th, the same GIF was reblogged onto Cheezburger's Memebase, where it picked up hundreds more upvotes and reposts3.

The meme hit its viral peak in late March 2013. On March 27th, a dedicated @PatrickPics Twitter feed launched and pulled in roughly 19,000 followers within 48 hours, and a Facebook fan page appeared the same day3. A Surprised Patrick Tumblr blog followed on March 28th, and UpRoxx ran a slideshow of edits3. On March 29th, Mashable wrote up the surge and credited /r/PicturesWithPatrick with pushing the format across Reddit and Tumblr1. In April 2013, Queerty published its own gallery of Surprised Patrick edits reacting to drag queens, sex and Bravo reality stars2, and Funny or Die, Smosh and Bite.ca ran similar roundups3.

Timeline

2004

The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie is released, containing the cliff scene that becomes the source frame.

2008-01-29

An animated GIF of the shocked Patrick and SpongeBob scene is uploaded to Glitter-Graphics.

2011-10-23

Tumblr user Lexcali ranks the 'shocked Patrick' face at number six in a post on the best SpongeBob facial expressions.

How to Use This Meme

The template is typically made by cropping the shocked Patrick out of the movie still or GIF and pasting him into an unrelated photo, often at the edge of the frame like an onlooker. Common versions place him reacting to celebrity photos, gross-out imagery, historic events or other cartoons. GIF edits, where his face is composited into a moving scene, are also standard.

Frequently Asked Questions