Sad Dog on the Phone

About

Sad Dog on the Phone refers to a series of photos which show a dog appearing to grow disheartened while a person holds a phone near his ear. The photos were joked about as people imagined what bad news the dog may be receiving.

Origin

On January 13th, 2016, Twitter user @mvenzxx^[1] tweeted the pictures with the caption "what the hell did they tell this dog?", gaining over 3,400 retweets and 4,600 likes (shown below).

Spread

A four-panel image of the photo began spreading through Tumblr^[2] shortly after, gaining over 78,000 notes (shown below). The photo has appeared in multiple Buzzfeed listicles.^[3][4]

The dog has also been used as a reaction image to various captions. For example, one appeared in an Imgur photodump on October 11th, 2016 (shown below, left). An example captioned "When your mom forces you to speak to your relatives" gained over 45,000 likes on Instagram account nochill (shown below, right).

991 I hav a emergenci

In August of 2018, a photoshop of the image was created which distorted the dog's eyes, captioned "991 I have a emergenci"^[5] (shown below).

This grew popular on Reddit in the coming months. For example, an edit was posted to /r/MemeEconomy on March 15th, 2019, gaining over 240 points (shown below, left). It has appeared on several other subreddits, including /r/memes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References