Sad Joe Biden

About

Sad Joe Biden is a series of humorously captioned images based on a photograph of United States Vice President Joe Biden staring out a window during a summit between the U.S. president Barack Obama and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at the White House in September 2014.

Origin

On September 18th, 2014, Getty Images photographer Oliver Douliery photographed Biden staring pensively out a window at the White House.

“US Vice-President Joe Biden looks on during a bilateral meeting between President Obama and President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine in the Oval Office of the White House September 18, 2014 in Washington, DC. The two leaders held a bilateral meeting to discuss a strategic aid package for Ukraine for its battle with pro Russian separatists.”

On December 6th, 2014, Twitter user Michael Doran^[2] tweeted the photo, inviting followers to post captions of Biden’s internal monologue.

Spread

On December 6th, Twitter user @Popehat^[7] tweeted the photo with a quote uttered by the character Tuco in the 1966 Spaghetti Western film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (shown below, left). The following day, Twitter user Rachel Zarrell^[8] posted the photo with the caption “but did adnan do it tho?” (shown below, right). .

Several minutes later, the BuzzFeed Twitter^[3] feed urged followers to caption the photo (shown below, left) On December 8th, Twitter user Vince Coglianese tweeted a photoshopped image of Biden looking at the window next to the character Clark Grisworld from the 1989 comedy film National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (shown below, right). In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the Twitter captions, including The Daily Dot,^[4] Today^[5] and The Washington Post.^[6]