Apparently things haven’t changed much since 1874.Â
Twitter users are celebrating the re-birth of a meme, featuring a man explaining something to a woman who is very much not interested in what he has to say, and it’s going exactly as one would expect.
The resurfaced meme started taking off on Monday when Twitter account WikiVictorian shared an image of “The Irritating Gentleman,” an 1874 work by German painter Berthold Woltze, showing a man in a top hat bothering a woman on a train. The image was first meme-ified back in 2012, according to KnowYourMeme, when a Tumblr post gained over 177,000 notes.
But today, the meme calls back to Milk Edinburgh—the image of that guy at a party bothering a disinterested woman—and Twitter users are having fun with it.Â
Of course, WikiVictorian is a page dedicated to “sharing random stuff from 1800 to 1920s,” as its bio insists, including various old-school tech and art. And while making a meme likely wasn’t the account operator’s intention, “The Irritating Gentleman” has become a hotbed for quote tweets and absurd captions.
Check out what people on Twitter are doing to meme-out the classic artwork below.Â
