That Post Gave Me Cancer

2010image macroclassic

Published July 30, 2026

That Post Gave Me Cancer is a 4chan image macro featuring characters lying sick in bed, captioned with the phrase to trash a low-quality post. The format took off around 2010 after an anonymous user paired the line with a screencap of Spider-Man on a hospital bed from the 1967 animated series.

4chan memescatchphrase memesreaction memes1967 spider man memessnowclone memes

Overview

That Post Gave Me Cancer is a reply-style image macro that pairs a picture of a sick or bedridden character with the caption "That post gave me cancer." People drop it in comment threads to say the post above them is so bad it made the reader ill1. On 4chan, "cancer" had been slang for garbage content since at least November 2007, tied to the older phrase "The Cancer That Is Killing /b/"1.

The anchor image uses a screencap from "To Cage a Spider," episode 19 of season two of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon, often called 60's Spider-Man2. In the shot, Peter Parker is stuck in a hospital bed, which reads cleanly as a reaction to something awful enough to put him there. Later versions swap Spider-Man for any character who looks unwell, and the joke still lands1.

Origin & Background

Platform
4chan (/co/ board)
Creator
Unknown
Date
2010

The source scene first aired on January 18th, 1969, when "To Cage a Spider" premiered on ABC as part of the 1967 Spider-Man series2. In April 2009, Marvel started streaming episodes of the show online, and stills from 60's Spider-Man began circulating on 4chan's /co/ board through the following months1. An anonymous user in one of those threads slapped the caption "That Post Gave Me Cancer" onto the hospital-bed shot, creating the base macro1.

The earliest confirmed reposts of the finished image sit on JoyReactor, dated March 30th, 20103, and on the 4chan mirror site Chan4Chan, dated November 30th, 20104.

How It Spread

Through the early 2010s, the caption jumped off the Spider-Man screencap and onto other sick-in-bed shots of cartoon characters, real people, and animals1. Every riff keeps the same core beat: the post you replied to was so terrible it hospitalized the character in the picture. Because any picture of someone looking miserable can carry the line, the format was easy to spin up on the fly.

The caption also spawned two snowclones. "That Post Gave Me X" swaps out cancer for any other ailment, and "That Y Gave Me Cancer" blames a different noun for the sickness (a video, a thread, a subreddit)1. Urban Dictionary logged variant definitions in the surrounding cancer-slang cluster over the same stretch5.

The original macro cooled off after the early 2010s, but "that post gave me cancer" is still a stock 4chan reply that shows up without the image attached.

How to Use This Meme

Grab any picture of a character or person looking sick, hospitalized, or bedridden, and add the caption "That post gave me cancer." Post it as a reply to a thread or comment you think is bad. The snowclones "That Post Gave Me [ailment]" and "That [noun] Gave Me Cancer" work the same way, swapping either half of the sentence1.

Frequently Asked Questions