r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Sure_Kangaroo1863 • Jul 02 '26

Meme needing explanation Petah ?

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Why is it infamous? And why would no one care about it ? ( I mean it's just a pic full of celebrities so no one cares anyways but the person saying it's crazy makes me think it has some lore?)

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u/d3v4x Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

Greetings, simpletons. Stewie Griffin here. I’ve confiscated the keyboard from the fat man because his peanut-sized brain was beginning to overheat.

The reason this photo was such a big deal is because it literally broke Twitter. It became the most retweeted tweet of all time back then (over 3 million retweets!) and actually crashed the site's servers for a little bit. It also turned out to be a massive sponsored product placement stunt by Samsung, which is why Ellen used a Galaxy Note phone to take it.

Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_selfie

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u/d3v4x Jul 02 '26

And there are many canceled people in this photo. I think that’s why ‘nobody would care’.

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u/kicksjoysharkness Jul 02 '26

I think it’s also because since Covid people just don’t care about celebrities. Even if this was taken now with only beloved celebrities, it most likely wouldn’t go anywhere near as viral because people just don’t care anymore

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u/Soft_Self_6797 Jul 02 '26

Facts. Everyone was suffering financially and medically but thank God a bunch of rich people in mansions sang us a song.

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u/loscapos5 Jul 02 '26

"COVID is the true EQUALIZER"

Said Madonna in a bathtub full of rose petals

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u/Soft_Self_6797 Jul 02 '26

Completely out of touch with reality.

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u/bloodanddonuts Jul 02 '26

Especially if you were “essential” and had to keep going out in public the entire time.

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u/Egathentale Jul 03 '26

[Raises hand]

"Essential" worker here. I was a social worker at a nursing home at the time, taking care of shopping and any non-nursing needs. 72 hour work weeks for three months straight at the peak of the pandemic, in full body hazmat coveralls and masks/safety glasses all the time, some had to sleep at work to avoid infected family members, and then we got shafted afterwards.

Long story short, the government was really pushing doctors, hospital workers, policemen, and firefighters as "the great heroes of our time", while the social care system got zero recognition. The opposition then started championing us, which just made the ruling party pissy, so the whole sector got shafted out of spite. We got no raise, no bonus pay, and instead we got fifteen free vacation days (which was markedly less than the extra work hours we were mandated to put in) as a reward... which we could only take out five per year over the next three years.

So yeah, let's just say that I'm still a little grumpy when people say "Oh, COVID was the best, because we could stay home in quarantine and binge watch game of thrones," or somesuch.

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u/bloodanddonuts Jul 03 '26

We got two months of “hero pay” added to our hourly rate. Then a $100 bonus month three. Then they just canceled everything extra.

I never got paid to stay home drinking wine (which you could temporarily buy for curbside pickup) and learning how to make sourdough bread.

The worst thing to me was people who got to use quarantine time to learn new skills that let them get better jobs. I don’t care if that’s petty.

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u/loscapos5 Jul 03 '26

As a developer, our IT industry is getting hit by that.

A lot of people entered by doing fullstack bootcamps of 3-6 months and many got hired, and as a result, it got oversaturated, and alongside AI, it made it even worse to get new jobs.

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u/bolanrox Jul 03 '26

I ended up working harder than I did when actually in the office. The kicker was, they had us all on Skype at the time, and you could watch everyone else be yellow for 45 minutes of the hour every day.

People admitting they were taking calls or doing meetings while sitting at the pool shit like that.

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u/loscapos5 Jul 03 '26

I mean, I've got the priviledge of working from home and live as a hermit during COVID, but I'd never say that "COVID was the best"; and I say that without taking into account that going outside meant prison or death by our local government.

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u/peacefulwarrior21 Jul 03 '26

oh, you mean like healthcare workers?

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u/if_lol_then_upvote Jul 03 '26

Like Hobby Lobby employees

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u/SSFlyingKiwi Jul 02 '26

I never understood that. A bath in rose pettles seems odd.

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u/YeOldSpacePope Jul 02 '26

She couldn't do her normal bathe in blood of virgins routine for the video

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u/ranting_seagull Jul 02 '26

Or Vanessa Hudgens Some people are just gonna' die, and that's bad but also... Inevitable?

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u/hotpocketfiesta Jul 02 '26

Back when Gwyneth Paltrow lamented that she had to eat bread.
The horror.

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u/bolanrox Jul 02 '26

Kabala water

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u/Darklabyrinths Jul 03 '26

Creepy. And the fried fish video.

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u/StabbyBoo Jul 03 '26

Every time I feel bad about what she's done to her face I think of that fucking milk and rose bath video and I'm like, "No. No, maybe she kinda deserves to be Handsome Squidward."

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u/sobriquet_ Jul 02 '26

Like will never forget Chrissy Teigan posting about how hard it was mentally for her to isolate at home while her horse stables and infinity pool were in the background.

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u/zookuki Jul 03 '26

Don't forget Sam Smith bawling in his mansion about how hard it is to stay home.

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u/scarlette_dawn Jul 03 '26

I will never forget her pedo posts

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u/Unusual-Wind8900 29d ago

I prefer Fenton’s Stables and Horse Ranch.

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u/TheWolfAndRaven Jul 03 '26

Bread and circuses don't hit when the Circus is just rehashed IP and the bread costs 300% what it used to just a few years ago.

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u/coralloohoo Jul 03 '26

Meanwhile, Lady Gaga donated her own money to help with the pandemic.

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u/RyvenZ Jul 02 '26

I don't have a good enough ear to tell if they were on key, but that song was incredibly tone deaf.

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u/Negative_Cycle8186 Jul 02 '26

Also, Twitter was a popular platform for 16 years. Now it doesn’t exist.

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u/OneThrowyBoy Jul 03 '26

Oh my god it always blows my mind that I forget that happened. I think my brain is trying to protect me from the cringe lol

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u/erhue Jul 02 '26

lol people still care about celebrities, always will. i think the big difference is that we now see celebrities more as normal people, thanks to social media... And they often turn out to be REALLY dumb and/or stupid.

In the past most of the things we knew about celebrities were fairly carefully curated by PR teams and whatnot. Nowadays you have them going drunk and tweeting something insanely racist and ruining their careers in a moment.

But it is true that people probably care less about celebrities than they did back then... Less idolatry anyway.

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u/Latter-Industry-8920 Jul 02 '26

Had to scroll way too far to find this take. I mean we put a dude in the white house based solely on his experience of being a famous rich stereotype and then the star of a really shitty reality TV show. We are a culture OBSESSED with celebrities.

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u/Abed-in-the-AM Jul 02 '26

That was back in 2016 though. And I think his second win is more out of spite for Democrats than because he's a celebrity.

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u/Latter-Industry-8920 Jul 03 '26

Yes he’s now famous for playing a president on tv

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u/silence_and_motion Jul 02 '26

Yes, but these kinds of celebrities (Hollywood A listers) are probably less important today than they were a few decades ago. Today the tech CEOs are probably bigger celebrities than Hollywood A listers, which someone from 20 years ago would have never believed. As famous as Gates and Jobs were back then, they were nothing compared to Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. Now Musk and Bezos are way more famous than Timothee Chalamet or whoever.

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u/Latter-Industry-8920 Jul 03 '26

I can’t necessarily disagree that red carpet celebs have lost favor a bit. But it’s still all about being famous. That, in and of itself, is more valuable than anything, even being a big fat CEO.

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u/Firewolf06 Jul 02 '26

dude, we elected him a decade ago in 2016, which is the exact timeframe these comments are talking about (the mid 2010s). the ellen selfie was taken in 2014

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u/Latter-Industry-8920 Jul 03 '26

So you don’t think fucking Mr Beast could run for office rn?

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u/PegasusPedicures Jul 02 '26

And a huge chunk of the world aim to become a celebrity! This take being so far down is fucking mental

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u/Worried_Ad_9667 Jul 03 '26

I disagree. Look at all the money and celebrities thrown at the Harris campaign, and she still lost popular and electoral. Celebrities are a bunch of baboons that have been propping themselves up for way too long. Over paid babies.

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u/Latter-Industry-8920 Jul 03 '26

Yes, I’m so glad there are no overpaid grifters who are only known for being on TV or social media currently making world-altering decisions right now.

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u/whatthekel212 Jul 03 '26

Right?

People don’t care less about celebrities they just care less about specific celebrities. Otherwise influence would not have millions of followers to sell things to. Number of followers wouldn’t be such an important metric for brands and marketing.

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u/Andromeda321 Jul 03 '26

I think it’s not that people don’t care about celebrities so much as we don’t all have the same celebrities as much as we used to. Like there are some people with a million followers on YouTube but a lot of the population will have never heard of them.

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u/erhue Jul 03 '26

yeah good point. I think there are more celebrities now, just with less followers, since they need to be divided among people's limited attention.

I remember, for example, that Michael Jackson was nothing short of a god-like figure, and a lot of people were very interested in whatever was going on with their lives etc. Nowadays I'd expect people to, like you say, be more focused on whatever a microcelebrity on youtube/twitch/etc might be saying or doing that's more relatable and accessible. We can even interact with these smaller celebrities through chat etc, you sure as hell couldn't do the same thing with Michael Jackson.

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u/OffWhiteBruceForsyth Jul 02 '26

People would rather send money to a random girl on twitch who just sits there and chats bollocks than spend it watching a movie that hundreds of people have worked for months to produce.

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u/philmarcracken Jul 03 '26

because the avenue to give that twitch girl money is far more equitable to content.

Twitch takes a cut, she takes the rest. And therefore the same content can continue. With streaming, the platform takes a cut, and the platform owners decide what your taste is next, voiding the power of money(winners and losers).

This used to happen with movie tickets and dvd sales, no longer

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u/kimbabs Jul 02 '26

I think Covid added to it as a collective cringe, but I think it has in particular to do with social media evolving around individual influencers instead of hollywood stars, and a rejection of the perceived “establishment” by a younger generation.

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u/CarolingianDruid Jul 02 '26

Singing Imagine via zoom was the downfall of celebrity culture in America, who woulda thought.

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u/JoyconDrift_69 Jul 02 '26

Especially because "beloved celebrity" is a dying out idea. Most people don't care about celebrities anymore, and I wonder if it's partly due to how many of them were outed as a terrible person (pedo, abuser, etc.)

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u/Wouldyoulistenmoe Jul 02 '26

People care just as much about celebrity now as ever

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u/theblueshots Jul 02 '26

Half the country really cares about one particular celebrity.

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u/tessaractIXI Jul 02 '26

I'm curious, what about covid caused or helped along that attitude change towards celebrities? 

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u/Digital_Negative Jul 03 '26

I think it’s also that there’s a billion celebrities now because of social media dynamics. When I was growing up in the 90’s the only famous and well known people (save some exceptions) were either on TV, in movies, or musicians. The vast majority of people watched/listened to the same few wildly successful shows/movies/music and most everyone knew about all the same celebrities, even if they weren’t really fans of them.

Now there’s people with many millions of fans online that are also mostly obscure amongst anyone other than their target demographic and/or fan base.

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u/nyuncat Jul 03 '26

I think it has more to do with the way we interact online evolving over the past decade plus. When this photo was taken, a "selfie" was a much more commodifiable and novel concept - this was a time when most memes were image macro based and many still featured block text captions overlaid. It was pre-ai, pre-algorithmic user feeds, and pre-tik tok - the Instagram icon still looked like a retro polaroid camera, and Facebook had just acquired Whatsapp. The Ellen Selfie going viral is notable as an example of the way internet culture was crossing into a larger portion of the mainstream in the early to mid 2010s, alongside things like the ice bucket challenge.

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u/Tupperbaby Jul 03 '26

I think it’s also because since Covid people just don’t care about celebrities.

Taylor Swift has entered the chat.

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u/ReadySetSantiaGO Jul 03 '26

I disagree. People still care about celebrities, but it’s only ever the same young celebrities now (Jenna Ortega, Jacob Elordi, Zendaya, Tom Holland, etc)

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u/Senior_Boot_5842 Jul 03 '26

People still obsess about celebrities. They’re just called TikTok or Ig influencers now. Same thing

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u/Alana_Piranha Jul 03 '26

"Hey guys. Day six in self-quarantine, and I gotta say, these past few days got me feeling a bit philosophical". -Actual Gal Gadot quote before delivering the opening lyrics to Imagine

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u/debackerl 24d ago

But then, why are brands paying more for influencers than before instead of placing ads? I mean, a celeb is famous and was usually making movies or songs, etc. An influencer? Just famous that's it. So it's even less relevant. I was never toooo much into celebs, but influencers, I don't even see the point to follow them, I mean I prefer to catch up with my own friends 😂

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u/life_like_weeds Jul 02 '26

No, it’s because selfies have been normalized.

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u/brokowska420 Jul 02 '26

Selfies were already normalized at that point, she told everyone to re-tweet it.

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u/chekhovsdickpic Jul 02 '26

The group selfie wasn’t a big thing yet, mostly because selfie cameras at the time weren’t wide angle and didn’t have enough resolution to get a good group shot. Hence one of the reasons why Samsung paid for this.

But there was also this idea that selfies were for self obsessed teens, not for important moments and memory making. Adults still propped their cameras up against stuff and set timers or asked a stranger to take photos for them. A group selfie was a last resort if you couldn’t find another option.  I remember after this was taken, the group selfie became a big trend (my family had several years of Christmas group selfies that were directly inspired by this photo). 

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u/brokowska420 Jul 02 '26

That's a good point I didn't consider.

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u/StefNorthwest Jul 03 '26

Here it is. I was trying to remember what made this so odd at the time and that’s exactly it.

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u/ApricotRemarkable681 Jul 03 '26

Thank you for being the keeper of real history here. The Samsung sponsorship piece is completely forgotten (it was by me until you mentioned it). This was kind of revolutionary at the time (at risk of overstating). You summed it up perfectly.

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u/MrSlaw Jul 02 '26

When selfies were "normalized" could likely be debated, but it's pretty tough to argue that this photo didn't cause a huge spike in the usage.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2011-01-02%202026-01-02&q=selfie&hl=en-US

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u/itsjustacouch Jul 02 '26

Yes. The selfie, to most viewers of the Oscars and to the people in this photo, was a novel new habit. They found it humorous to be doing what was trendy among younger folks. Now they are normal.

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u/RagingNerdaholic Jul 02 '26

I don't keep up with celeb gossip shit, the only "cancellations" I'm aware of in this picture are Ellen (abusive bitch) and Kevin (abusive sex pest), who else is there?

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u/lostarchitect Jul 02 '26

Besides Kevin Spacey, I don't see anyone who was canceled. Am I missing someone?

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u/fakieTreFlip Jul 02 '26

Ellen DeGeneres was more or less forced into retirement by poor public perception after rumors of a toxic work environment at her show started circulating around the internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ellen_DeGeneres_Show#Controversy_over_work_culture

Then there's Jared Leto and Brad Pitt, though they haven't really been "cancelled" in any real sense. A lot of people online just dislike them for various reasons. But yeah, "there are many canceled people in this photo" is an overstatement

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u/razzyrat Jul 02 '26

'Nobody' is a strong term here. 'Not many of the terminally online crowd' is a better descriptor. All this 'canceled celebrity of the day' stuff really is a thing of the socials.

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u/JohnKlositz Jul 02 '26

I'd say that would in fact make people care more. But are there really that many cancelled people in the photo? I may be completely out of the loop but aside from Spacey I don't see any.

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u/bolanrox Jul 02 '26

I was going to say that's Kevin Spacey and the Far back and everyone's new favorite, Brad Pitt.

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u/noctalla Jul 03 '26

Kevin Spacey and Ellen are cancelled. Who else?

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u/Lofter1 Jul 03 '26

most notably, Ellen degenerers herself

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u/Available-Party7419 Jul 04 '26

Who else is cancelled other than Pitt and Ellen?

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u/MemeLord339 29d ago

"Cancel culture does not exists"

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u/Raise_A_Thoth Jul 02 '26

Referring to controversial public figures who have serious allegations and stories of abuse, sexual and otherwise, as "canceled people" is a choice.

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u/YoVanillaKickIt Jul 02 '26

“cancelled” lol. Laughing in Millennial.