About Scumbag Steve
Scumbag Steve is an advice animal character based on a photograph of a youth dressed in baggy clothes with a sideways fitted cap and standing in a hallway. As the name suggests, the image macros portray the character as an opportunistic and freeloading juvenile who wreak havoc in various social situations.
Origin
The original image came from the cover of the album “Ma Gangsta”[1] by the rap group Beantown Mafia.[2] The first known image macros were posted in a compilation to Reddit[3] in a thread that reached the front page on January 21st, 2011 and received 8,607 up votes prior to being archived. A commenter in the Reddit thread identified the young man in the photo as Blake Boston, also known as “Weezy B.” In an interview with Know Your Meme, Blake revealed that the picture was originally taken by his mother.
Spread
The scumbagsteve.com[13] domain was registered on January 27th, 2011. A compilation of Scumbag Steve images were posted to BuzzFeed[14] on February 2nd, 2011. The Daily Mail[15] posted an article about Blake Boston’s reaction to becoming Internet famous on February 11th. A Facebook[16] fan page has 13,953 likes, a Quickmeme[20] page has 73,815 submissions and a Meme Generator[21] page has 153,149 submissions as of April 6th, 2012. Other derivatives can be found on Tumblr[17], Memebase[18] and Funny Junk.[19]
Notable Examples
The meme was particularly well received by Reddit’s /r/trees subreddit, leading to creation of many image macros with references to smoking etiquettes and commonly shared experiences under the influence of cannabis. Blake later confirmed his appreciation of the marijuana enthusiast subreddit, /trees.
Derivatives
A number of notable spin-off instances surfaced on Reddit, many of them influenced by the Dogfort saga as well as current news, such as the oh-so-funny “Mubarak Steve” satirizing the Egyptian president’s ill-advised decision to shut off the nation’s internet access for days in late January 2011.
Scumbag Hat
Hundreds of image macros have since emerged featuring Scumbag Steve’s trademark hat photoshopped onto other people and objects accompanied by Scumbag Steve style captions. The hat is a New Era Red Sox ‘A-TOOTH’ brown fitted hat. A similar style with slightly different colors can be found at the Hatland website.[6]
Scumbag Brain
The first Scumbag Brain derivative was posted to Reddit on March 24th, 2011. It featured an image of a human brain with text describing frustrating lapses in judgement or memory. On July 17th, 2011, a Quickmeme[7] page was created for “Scumbag Brain”. There are currently over 400 submissions to the Quickmeme page as of August 11th, 2011.
