What Do You Mean You Lost the Baby?
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About
What Do You Mean You Lost the Baby? refers to an image macro of Duke Nukem standing over the female character from the Loss comic, captioned with a joke imagining Duke misinterpreting what the character losing her unborn child means. Following the initial spread in late 2021, the exploitable image gained popularization as a recaption meme format in subsequent years.
Origin
In the original "Loss" strip by Ctrl+Alt+Del (shown below), the female character Lilah suffers a miscarriage as she's pictured lying in a hospital bed in the last frame. The webcomic has been extensively parodied online, later spawning a pattern-recognition meme.
On August 6th, 2021, iFunny[1] user Sanic2005 posted an edit of the last panel of the comic in which the male character was replaced by Duke Nukem, the protagonist of the Duke Nukem first-person shooter video game series. The panel was captioned with an in-character misinterpretation joke, with Duke misunderstanding what "losing the baby" means and suggesting that the woman goes to find it. The post (shown below) received over 24,900 smiles in three years.
Spread
In the following months, the post was widely circulated online through reposts. On September 30th, 2021, voice actor Gianni Matragrano uploaded a voiced version of the meme, with the upload (shown below) garnering over 1.5 million views on YouTube[2] in three years.
On February 12th, 2024, X[3] user @jojoton56 posted an edit of the meme that replaced Duke Nukem with the character Papyrus from the indie video game Undertale. The post, which is the earliest found edit of the original meme, garnered over 920 reposts and 9,300 likes in 10 months (shown below).
On August 24th, 2024, iFunny[4] user Sparkle posted the earliest discovered recaption meme based on the Duke Nukem version. The post, a joke about the digital distribution platform Steam, gained over 8,500 smiles in four months (shown below).
The edit saw viral spread in the following weeks, popularizing the recaption format in the fall of 2024.
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[2] YouTube – What do you mean you lost the baby?
[3] X – @jojoton56
