Bert from Sesame Street in sunglasses leaning against a wall with text reading 'That's Real Fuckin' Neato'

That's Real Fuckin' Neato

2009image macroclassic

Published October 1, 2026

That's Real Fuckin' Neato is an image macro featuring Bert from Sesame Street leaning against a wall in a stereotypical cool-guy pose, cropped from a 1988 storybook illustration2. The earliest archived copies trace back to 4chan's /jp/ board in April 20091, where it became a go-to sarcastic reaction image for dismissing something uninteresting while pretending to care.

reaction memes sarcasm memes dismissal memes muppets memes image macro memes

Overview

That's Real Fuckin' Neato pairs a tightly cropped picture of Bert, slouched casually against a wall with his hands near his pockets, with the titular bottom-text caption delivered in deliberately profane understatement3. The pose and caption together read as a sarcastic brush-off, used to acknowledge a story, achievement or opinion without actually caring about it.

The image works because Bert's placid Muppet face does not match the vulgar framing of the text, which is the entire gag. The source illustration itself is wholesome children's-book art, so the macro gets its charge from treating a Sesame Street character as a bored, over-it adult sarcastically humoring whoever he is listening to2.

Origin & Background

Platform
4chan /jp/ (earliest archive)
Date
2009

The underlying picture is cropped from a page of the Sesame Street storybook Just Like Ernie, published in 1988 by Western Publishing2. The exact author of the macro and the moment it was first captioned are not documented, but the earliest archived instance of the image used as a reaction appears in a thread on 4chan's Otaku Culture board (/jp/) dated April 26th, 20091. From that posting onward it circulated as a copy-pasted reply image rather than a template people built new variants of.

How It Spread

Hard documentation of the macro's spread outside its 4chan origin is thin. The 2009 /jp/ thread preserved on archive.moe is the earliest concrete appearance that can still be cited1, and the Know Your Meme entry notes that both the identity of the original editor and the full timeline between the storybook image and the macro's online debut are unknown3.

What is clear is that the picture settled into the long tail of imageboard reaction images, where it kept being reposted as a sarcastic reply any time someone announced something unremarkable. It never jumped to a mainstream platform in the way that other Sesame Street edits of Bert and Ernie did, and the Know Your Meme article's Spread and Notable Examples sections are still marked as work in progress3.

Timeline

1988

Western Publishing releases the Sesame Street storybook Just Like Ernie, which contains the Bert illustration later cropped for the macro[2].

2009-04-26

Earliest archived use of the That's Real Fuckin' Neato image as a reaction appears in a thread on 4chan's /jp/ board[1].

2009

The macro is logged on Know Your Meme, with its exact creator and viral path left undocumented[3].

Frequently Asked Questions