Pickup Line Scientist

About

Pickup Line Scientist is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photograph of the character Howard Wolowitz (played by Simon Helberg) from the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory. The captions typically combine sexual innuendo and puns related to physics, chemistry, biology and other hard sciences, in similar vein to the advice animal characters Dat Ash, Priority Peter and Chemistry Cat.

Origin

Redditor imonfirex727 submitted the first Pickup Line Scientist image macro to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[2] subreddit on July 26th, 2011 (shown below). Prior to being archived, the post received over 500 up votes and 25 comments.

Spread

The meme remained relatively dormant for most of August until a compilation of notable Pickup Line Scientist examples was submitted to the Internet humor site 9gag^[6] by user amberislove on August 28th, 2011. Within 13 months, the post received over 3,350 Facebook shares and 2,950 up votes. On December 9th, Redditor firelizard72 submitted an image macro with the caption “My wavelength might be short / but the frequency is outta this world”^[4] (shown below, left), which received over 1,000 up votes and 20 comments prior to being archived. On the following day, firelizard72 submitted another image macro with the caption “You don’t need a rockwell test / to characterize my hardness and penetration depth”^[3] (shown below, right), receiving over 1,760 up votes and 30 comments prior to being archived.

On December 17th, the “Pickup Line Scientist” Tumblr^[5] blog was created, which highlighted 12 Pickup Line Scientist image macros in the next month. On September 13th, 2012, FunnyJunk user heavenz submitted an image macro with the caption “Baby I’ll treat you like my homework / I’ll slam you on the table and do you all night long” (shown below). Within four months, the post received over 26,000 views and nearly 600 up votes.

Notable Examples

As of January 2012, the “Pickup Line Scientist” Quickmeme page has received over 4,600 submissions. Additional examples can be found on Tumblr^[7] under the tag “#pickup line scientist.”