‘Big Head, Little Body’ Is the Perfect Meme for Humiliating Smug People
The art world has provided us with a beautiful new meme for a world wide web afflicted with a constant state of bigheadedness.
Belgian artist Thomas Lerooy’s surreal bronze monument Not enough brains to survive (2009) is popping off on Reddit as a one-shot-one-kill meme for calling out ego and over inflated self-worth. Now known as “the big head tiny body meme,” it’s a perfect tool for mocking self-appointed grammar police and annoying fandoms.
The website for Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, which represents Lerooy’s work in Belgium, says the artist’s “immaculately detailed drawings and sculptures betray an uncanny understanding of the weight of human life—a weight that is as insuperable in the face of vice as it is slyly comical in the face of mortality.” Translation: everything this dude makes is tailor-made for memes. Case and point:
Me, after work: “I’ll just have one.”
Every time I go into a bar and the world cup is on.
But Not enough brains to survive is the one the internet has latched onto. It’s a striking image and instantly recognizable. Even the dank meme community has embraced “big head little body.”
Someone on Reddit’s r/memeeconomy forum compared it to the Expanding Brain meme, but “big head little body” is actually even more versatile. An early form of the meme cropped up on r/milliondollarextreme in January, kneecapping Mark Zuckerberg as he was speaking publicly about fixing Facebook. But it’s uses are not limited to deflating egos, it can go the other way too, relatably illustrating how overstimulating the world is today.
The internet has no shortage of big-headed assholes, so this meme should have (disturbingly tiny) legs for a while.
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This article originally appeared on VICE US.