Full portrait of Yobama, Yoda's body with Obama's face edited in.

Yobama

2009image macroclassic

Published October 8, 2026

Yobama is a face-swap image that pastes Barack Obama's features onto Yoda, born in a 2009 Photoshop contest and dug back up by Instagram meme pages in late 2018. The absurd crossover powered a wave of ironic edits, Crab Rave remixes and 'perfect crossover character' jokes that spilled onto Reddit's r/dankmemes.

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Overview

Yobama is a portmanteau of Yoda and Obama attached to one specific image: a face-swap where Barack Obama's grinning face sits on Yoda's green, wrinkled head3. The joke works because the two subjects have nothing to do with each other, and the edit treats the mashup with mock reverence as if it were a legitimate crossover character.

Most Yobama posts lean into shitpost energy rather than political satire. The image gets paired with Crab Rave as a music video gag, dropped into 'Me, an intellectual' templates calling it the perfect crossover, or wedged into 'Name a More Iconic Duo' responses alongside the related Obunga edit1. Urban Dictionary entries from the same wave treat Yobama as a fake deity to invoke for random nonsense, which matches the ironic worship tone of the Instagram posts4.

Origin & Background

Platform
Worth1000 (origin) / Instagram and Reddit (viral spread)
Creator
Fichtenbrenner
Date
2009

The original Yobama image came from a June 2009 Worth1000 Photoshop contest called 'Celebrity Star Wars 5,' where user Fichtenbrenner submitted the Yoda-with-Obama's-face composite3. It sat largely unnoticed for nearly a decade as one entry in a themed contest among many.

The meme life of the picture started on May 11th, 2018, when Instagram user @vert_pio_ reposted the Photoshop with the hashtag #yobama, which other meme pages then started using to tag their own edits3.

How It Spread

Yobama stayed niche through mid-2018 and then spiked in December. On December 11th, 2018, the Meemes YouTube channel put out a compilation of Yobama edits, and two days later YouTuber Bepis uploaded a Crab Rave remix built around the image2. The same day, Instagram account @bepis.man posted the Crab Rave edit as a video, which pulled in more than 23,600 likes inside 72 hours3.

Also on December 13th, Instagram user @mrdisapproval.if posted a 'Name a More Iconic Duo' video pairing Yobama with Obunga, another Obama-face-swap character, which linked the two edits in the broader Instagram meme ecosystem3. Two days later the format jumped to Reddit, where u/Ragzio submitted a 'Me, an Intellectual' image macro calling Yobama the 'perfect crossover character' to r/dankmemes. That post pulled in over 14,200 points at 95% upvoted and around 90 comments within 48 hours1.

After the December 2018 surge, Yobama settled into the deep-fried face-swap canon alongside Obunga and similar Obama edits, with Urban Dictionary entries from the period treating the name as shorthand for ironic worship of a nonsense character4.

Timeline

2009-06

User Fichtenbrenner submits the Yoda + Obama face swap to the Worth1000 'Celebrity Star Wars 5' Photoshop contest.

2018-05-11

Instagram user @vert_pio_ reposts the image with the #yobama hashtag, kicking off its meme-page circulation.

2018-12-11

The Meemes YouTube channel uploads a compilation of Yobama-related edits.

2018-12-13

YouTuber Bepis posts a Crab Rave remix of the Yobama image; @bepis.man's Instagram cut pulls 23,600+ likes in 72 hours.

2018-12-13

Instagram user @mrdisapproval.if posts a 'Name a More Iconic Duo' video pairing Yobama with Obunga.

2018-12-15

Redditor u/Ragzio posts a 'Me, an Intellectual' Yobama image macro to r/dankmemes, hitting 14,200+ points.

Frequently Asked Questions