Despite Your Directions

Submission 10,879

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About

Despite Your Directions is a series of photoshop images based on a screen capture from the Steamed Hams segment from the American animated comedy The Simpsons. In the memes, people, frequently, alter the line "despite your directions" with words that rhyme with "direction" and edit the image to correspond with the alteration.

Origin

On April 14th, 1996, the episode of The Simpsons "22 Short Films About Springfield" aired in the United States.^[1] In the episode, which is an anthology of 22 short scenes about several of the citizens of Springfield, the character Principal Skinner has Superintendent Chalmers over for dinner in a play on the "dinner with the boss" sitcom trope (shown below).^[2] The exchange begins with Chalmers saying, "Well, Seymour, I made it, despite your directions."

The earliest known usage of the first line being used as a photoshop meme was posted on October 6th, 2018 by Facebook ^[3] user domgohari in the Simpsons Shitposting Facebook group. The post features Skinner's head replaced by the Simpsons-illustration of recording artist Billy Corgan from the rock group Smashing Pumpkins and Chalmers's head replaced by a rat in a cage. They captioned the post "Well, Billy, I'm still just rat in a cage, despite your rage." The post received more than 800 reactions, 40 comments and 40 shares (shown below).

Spread

On October 6th, 2018 by Facebook^[4] user darren.connell.7 posted the image featuring Chalmers with a protrusion from his crotch and the caption "Well Seymour, I made it, despite my erection." The post received more than 900 reactions in two days (shown below, left).

Over the next two days, people within the Facebook group continued to post variations of the meme using words that rhyme with directions (shown below, center and right).