About
“Full Retard”, also known as “Nigga, You Just Went Full Retard”, is a catchphrase associated to the character Kirk Lazarus from the 2008 comedy film Tropic Thunder played by the actor Robert Downey, Jr. The expression is normally used as a reply to ilogical or stupid posts, in similar fashion to other phrases like Facepalm or “What is this I don’t even”.
Origin
The catchphrase comes from the film Tropic Thunder, starring Ben Stiller, Robert Downey, Jr. and Jack Black and premiered on August 13th, 2008, revolving arround a group of actors who are making a Vietnam War movie. One scene features the character Kirk Lazarus (played Robert Downey Jr) giving Chuck Speedman (played by Ben Stiller) advice and criticism on one of his films, Simple Jack. In the scene, he talks about how Chuck’s acting method for his mentally handicapped character, the titular Simple Jack went “full retard”, thereby overdoing the acting and making a possibly decent film stupid. Kirk uses examples of other famous films and actors who played similar characters.
Lazarus: “Everybody knows you never do a full retard.”
Speedman: “What do you mean?”
Lazarus: “Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, ‘Rain Man,’ look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Count toothpicks to your cards. Autistic, sure. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, ‘Forrest Gump.’ Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain’t retarded. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard.”
Spread
On August 6th, 2008, user kajoe submitted a definition for the term “full retard” on Urban Dictionary, descriving it as “act stupid, moronical or like an imbecile”.[1] The same day, user RIZZING submitted on the media sharing page FunnyJunk a picture of Lazarus with the caption “Nigga, you just went full retard”, though this image didn’t gain traction.[5] On September 6th, 2008, a thread on 4chan’s anime and manga board /a/ featured the first registered use of the term “full retard” on the site, refering to the character Clare from the manga series Claymore.[2]
On May 11th, 2012, a fan Facebook page titled “Nigga, you just went full retard.” was created, gaining over 2,800 likes during the following three years.[4] On July 17th, 2012, a MemeGenerator template was uploaded to the site, having over 1,500 images created and ranking as 3,648 most used template on the site as August 26th, 2015.[4] The catchphrase itself and the original picture have been used as a common reaction to images or posts denoted as “stupid”, being used on some websites like 4chan[3] or Tumblr.[6]
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1]Urban Dictionary – Full Retard
[2]archive.moe – Claymore C83!
[3]archive.moe – search for full retard
[4]Facebook – Nigga, you just went full retard.
[5]Meme Generator – Nigga, you just went full retard
[6]Tumblr – Search for you just went full retard
[7]FunnyJunk – Retards, retards every where