About

"Afraid to Ask" Andy is an advice animal image macro series featuring a still image of Andy Dwyer (played by Chris Pratt), one of the main characters from the American TV sitcom Parks and Recreation, captioned with various confessions of one's ignorance in current events or common knowledge followed by the phrase "…and at this point I’m afraid to ask.”

Origin

The caption stems from a memorable quote uttered by Andy Dwyer, who is portrayed as an oblivious but lovable city worker in the fictional town of Pawnee, in Season 6 Episode 16 "A New Slogan"^[5] originally aired on March 13th, 2014.

On October 23rd, 2014, Redditor john_solo76 created a post titled “Afraid to Ask Andy – Reddit is hard to follow sometimes”, featuring a photo of Dwyer with the caption “I don’t know what GamerGate is / And at this point I’m too afraid to ask” (shown below). In the first 24 hours, the post gained over 3,800 upvotes and 2,000 comments on the /r/AdviceAnimals^[2] subreddit.

Spread

On the same day, Redditor silkysmooth190 submitted an Afraid to Ask Andy image macro expressing ignorance about net neutrality to /r/AdviceAnimals^[4] (shown below, left). On October 24th, 2014, Redditor I_Am_Batman_For_Real posted an Afraid to Ask Andy image macro joking about the online fandoms for actor Nicolas Cage to /r/AdviceAnimals.^[3] In less than 24 hours, the posts received more than 3,300 votes (87% upvoted).

The same day, the tech news blog Mashable^[1] published an article highlighting several notable examples from the series.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Not available.

External References