About
How Italians Do Things, also known as the Italian Hand, is an image macro series featuring pictures of people performing various actions while making a finger purse hand gesture, with captions containing custom versions of the phrasal template“How Italians X.”
Origin
According to the Italian culture site Becoming Italian Word by Word,[1] the finger purse gesture is made by bunching one’s fingers together with the tips pointing upwards and typically means “what do you really want?” (shown below, left). On March 13th, 2017, Twitter user @donny_drama[12] posted photographs of person holding a coffee mug while making the finger purse gesture along with the caption “How Italians drink coffee” (shown below, right).
Spread
On March 14th, 2017, Twitter user @GeorgeResch[10] posted a screen captured image of the character Walter White from Breaking Bad making the hand gesture captioned with the description “How Italians cook crystal meth” (shown below, left). That same day, Redditor CafieroandMalatesta submitted a photograph of a cat holding a curled paw titled “How Italian cats argue” to /r/funny,[11] where it gained over 9,400 votes (90% upvoted) and 90 comments within 24 hours (shown below, right). Over the course of the day, several Weird Facebook meme pages posted various How Italians Do Things image macros, including The Meme Aesthetic,[4] Spongegar[5] and Supreme Zesty Memes for Teens.[6]
From March 15th onwards, images of the hand puppet characters from Oobi began to spread with various renditions of “How Italians X” on /r/meirl. The characters are often ironically described as Italian citizens due to their strong resemblance to the gesture. The first image with Oobi was posted by Redditor TarkatanTapir and captioned a scene from the show as “Italian war propaganda.” It amassed over 4,100 points (95% upvoted) and 45 comments within 20 hours (shown below, left).[13] Another Oobi meme, identifying the characters as “Italian devil worshippers 1965,” was posted to Imgur on the same day. Within 15 hours, it amassed over 1,000 points and 60,000 views.[14]
On March 15th, Imgur user Metapodlvl100 uploaded a gallery of How Italians Do Things images.[3] It has since gained about 110,000 views and 3,200 points. That same day, several posts about the series were submitted to /r/memeeconomy,[7][8][9] where many noted that images were quickly rising in popularity. On March 17th, Meme of the Month calendars started to appear with the hand gesture as March’s meme. By this point, Redditors who had witnessed the meme’s early success began to label it as overused.[15]
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1]Becoming Italian – The Language of Italian Gestures
[2]Reddit – How Italian cats argue
[3]Imgur – Italians doing stuff
[4]Facebook – Ｔｈｅ Ｍｅｍｅ Ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ
[6]Facebook – Supreme Zesty Memes for Teens
[7]Reddit – Italian Memes Taken Market by Storm
[8]Reddit – Memes on Italian gestures on the rise
[9]Reddit – Italian hand memes worth investing in?
[10]Twitter – @GeorgeResch
[11]Reddit – How Italian Cats Argue
[12]Twitter – @donny_drama
[13]Reddit – Oobi: Italian war propaganda