About

Inappropriate Timing Bill Clinton is an image macro series featuring a photo of an enthusiastic-looking former United States President Bill Clinton walking on stage to join an exhausted-looking President Barack Obama. The macros are typically captioned with inappropriate jokes associated with Clinton's past sex scandal.

Origin

On December 23rd, 2010, photographer Drew Angerer^[9] published a blog post titled "Obama and the Lame Duck Congress"^[2], which featured a photo of President Obama and former President Clinton making a surprise joint appearance in the White House briefing room to discuss a tax bill compromise (shown left). On April 16th, 2012, Redditor MadLarkin submitted the photograph to the /r/pics^[1] subreddit in a post titled "Words can not describe how much I love this pic of Obama and Clinton." In the post, Redditor bastian1343 posted an image macro of the photo with the caption "Whose unemployment rates do you have to lower to get blown around here?" (shown right).

Monica Lewinsky Scandal

Many of the jokes in the series reference Clinton's 1998 political sex scandal involving the then 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky claimed to have performed oral sex on Clinton on several occasions during the course of his presidency. After denying the claims under oath, Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate on February 12th, 1999 and was able to complete his second term as President of the United States.

Spread

After the original photo was posted to Reddit on April 16th, 2012, Redditor Mryoungmoolah submitted an image macro with the caption "Hey, what's the difference between Monica Lewinsky and the rest of us? / When we want some dick in the White House, we just vote" (shown left). Later that day, two other Bill Clinton image macros reached Reddit's^[5][6] front page (shown middle, right).

Also on April 16th, the web culture blog What's Trending^[8] posted a caption contest for the image, revealing that the photo was taken by photographer Drew Angerer in 2010. The following day, a Quickmeme page for "Inappropriate Timing Bill Clinton"^[3] was created. On April 18th, The Daily Dot^[7] published an article titled "Bill Clinton walks right into a meme", which compared the series to the Texts From Hillary image macros featuring his wife Hillary Clinton. The meme has since spread to Tumblr^[10] under the tag "#bill clinton."

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References