About
“That Would Be Great” is an image macro series featuring the character Bill Lumbergh from the 1999 comedy film Office Space. The captions typically mimic the character’s non-confrontational speech with various requests ending with the expression “That’d be great.”
Origin
The film Office Space was released on February 19th, 1999, in which the protagonist Peter Gibbons (played by Ron Livingston) is repeatedly exploited by his boss Bill Lumbergh (played by Gary Cole), a stereotype of a corporate manager who focuses on pointless paperwork and asks employees to work over the weekend.
On September 7th, 2011, Redditor Mekrob submitted a “read this in my voice” image macro to the /r/pics[1] subreddit, which featured a screen capture of Lumbergh with the caption “Yeeeaah, if you could just, go ahead and read this in my voice, that’d be great” (shown below). Prior to being archived, the post received over 480 up votes and 25 comments.
Spread
On October 10th, 2011, Redditor AnkenTEM submitted a post titled “That’d be great” to the /r/pics[6] subreddit, featuring a photograph of a hybrid cosplayer dressed as Lumbergh and Darth Vader from Star Wars with the caption “Yeah, if you could just, come to the dark side, that’d be great” (shown below, left). Prior to being archived, the post received over 3,400 upvotes and 40 comments. On May 13th, 2012, Redditor isntthatironic submitted a post titled “Lumbergh Cat” to the /r/AdviceAnimals[5] subreddit, featuring a photoshopped screen capture of Lumbergh with a superimposed cat’s head and the caption “Yeeaaaaahhhhh / I’m gonna need you to let me out even though you just let me back in” (shown below, right).
On December 24th, 2011 Redditor lifeisonebigjoe submitted a post titled “All I Want for Christmas” to the /r/AdviceAnimals[7] subreddit, which included a Bill Lumbergh image macro with the caption “Yeah, if we could all just stop shooting each other / That’d be great” (shown below). Within six hours, the post received over 17,000 up votes and 560 comments. As of December 24th, 2012, the Quickmeme page for “That Would Be Great”[2] has received more than 8,700 submissions, as well as two duplicate Quickmeme pages “Office Space Lumbergh”[3] and “Lumbergh”[4] with more than 880 submissions combined.
Notable Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1]Reddit – yeeaah if you could just read this
[2]Quickmeme – That Would Be Great
[3]Quickmeme – Office Space Lumbergh
[5]Reddit – Lumbergh Cat
[6]Reddit – That’d Be Great
[7]Reddit – All I Want for Christmas