Meme lore
What is the Orangutan Chasing Girl on a Tricycle meme?
This is a surreal composite meme built from two unrelated animal-and-child photographs: a girl running from a peacock and a separate photograph of an orangutan riding a tricycle. It is used as an absurd chase or escalation template, often assigning one caption to the fleeing person and another to the bizarre pursuer. The visual joke comes from treating an obviously impossible situation as if it were a dramatic, real-life pursuit.
Origin & history
The template is not an original photograph of an orangutan chasing the girl. Available meme-history records trace the background girl to a June 2016 Reddit post showing her running from a peacock, while the orangutan-on-tricycle image was previously published as part of Andrew Villasis’s 2007 Phuket Zoo photo series. In July 2016, users began compositing the orangutan image into the girl-running photograph, including versions associated with Photoshop Battles, Imgur, and early joke captions. The identity of the person who first made the exact blank composite remains unclear, and later reposts may differ in cropping or editing.
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