What is Dat Boi?
Dat Boi is a popular green frog character which is casually nicknamed as “That Boy” with a mispronunciation. The 3D frog is riding a unicycle and you will most likely see him along side a catch phrase like ” Here comes dat boi! ” or the other popular ” o shit waddup “. Both phrases and the Boi frog went viral first on social media in 2016.
How the popular nickname started
It all started in 2014 on the FunnyJunk website where a user posted a picture of a young boy named ” Dat Boi ” the pic was photoshopped obviously as the most wanted man ever arrested, it was a joke but it caught on.
What happened next was really a viral spiral of the phrase as in June 2015 a Tumblr user posted a message with the text ” Here come dat boi!! ” with a picture from a video game character Pac-Man and the caption ” o shit waddup! ” this was quickly removed from the site but it already gained more than 75,800 reblogs and notes in the following year so it became a viral hit.
Finally in 2016 a Facebook page called Fresh Memes posted a funny meme about MOjave Desert and Other Delectable Cuisines with an image of a green frog riding a unicycle and the caption ” Here come dat boi!!!!! and o shit waddup!” The green frog was an instant hit and it came from the Animation Factory Essential Collection 3.
popularity of Dat Boi
Since 2016 the dat boi meme/ character has been widely used online and some of the most notable examples are a Tumblr post by gollypon which posted this breaking news parody picture with a Pac-Man character together with the popular phrase ” Here come dat boi! “. Another example showing the popularity is another Tumblr post showing the green frog riding his unicycle inside an Avengers movie parody.
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Another good example is this post from April 2016 on Tumblr again by user Browse Dank Memes who posted a bad picture of the green frog riding his unicycle with the catch phrase. Another user than posted similar photos of the frog only this time five of them riding their bikes with the caption ” WE dem bois!!!! ”
After gaining such huge popularity it was clear that this meme was here to stay. It was featured in multiple publications like The Guardian’s  Mouth in Memes and NYMag, Paper Mag and Vox. It also had several Facebook Pages started just for the purpose of spreading this meme including a popular page called It’s Dat Boi which has well over 100,000 likes. Impressive.
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If you’re asking yourself how come no one ever created a video about this popular meme, well, someone did. YouTuber ZimoNitrome created a music video called ” dat boi!!!” ( original title right? LOL ) and published it on late 2016, the video shows the green frog with his unicycle and tunes from the Crank That ( Soulja Boy ). Did it became viral? It gained more than 8 million views so far, so YES.
Twitter didn’t get left behind and soon after that a user with the handle @MrMagDude stumbled upon the green frog in his Physics textbook and he tweeted this ” DAT BOI IS FROM AP PHYSICS 1 ESSENTIALS. pg 179 ” This simple tweet got more than 11,000 retweets and 16,000 likes. Still not convinced?
Reddit contribute their own massive community too
On a subreddit called /r/me_irl the Dat Boi appears again as people started posting the green frog but this time they created various versions of it and started to experiment a little bit like Reddit users love to do. One notable example was a series of posts by thederpytroller who created a post for every letter in the ” o shit waddup ” phrase and the Reddit community got together to upvote these posts to the front page so that you will see the these words on the front page of the internet. When it was achieved they took a screenshot and called it one of the greatest feasts of human achievement. It gained over 17,000 upvotes.
From that point on it was clear all the major news sites would cover this meme and The Daily Dot published a piece about this popular pic saying that a copypasta about Dat Boi was created on /r/copypasta. It reads
” You want to know why I love dat boi? Dat boi is a completely self-made meme. So many other memes are based in nostalgic childrens shows, funny faces, relatable situations, or references. Not dat boi. Dat boi is completely absurd. Itâs a low-res frog on a unicycle, and an arbitrary method for greeting him. The first person to ever upvote dat boi did not do so out of recognition. The first person to ever upvote dat boi did not do so because a pre-existing meme format. The first person to ever upvote dat boi upvoted a meme literally pulled from the ether by sheer human creativity and willpower. Dat boi is evidence that humans can stare into the meaningless void of eternity and force their own meaning onto to it. I will always upvote dat boi, o shit waddup! “
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Here is how popular this meme is on search
Here are some of the most recognizable examples of the Dat Boi meme:
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