About

“Yes, This is Dog” (also known as "Hello, This is Dog") is an image macro series featuring a black Labrador anthropomorphized with the caption as if it is answering the telephone. The phrase and image have been remixed into a variety of different photographs often including other animals in anthropomorphic situations.

Origin

The trope of anthropomorphizing domesticated pets has been seen prior to this series, most notably with LOLcat image macros in 2005, Dogfort comics in 2010 and "I Have No Idea What I'm Doing" images in 2011. The earliest known instance of the image macro featuring the caption "Yes, This is Dog" was posted by Tumblr blogger VivaDixies^[8] on October 2nd, 2011.

The photograph of the black Labrador originated from the 1984 Serbian film Pejzaži u magli ("Foggy Landscapes"), directed by Serbian director Jovan Jovanović.^[7][10] The scene is shown at 2:15 in the film:

Spread

On October 4th, 2011, the image was reposted in a Reddit thread titled "It's for you, boy"^[1], reaching the front page of the /r/funny subreddit with over 20,000 up votes. On October 30th, Redditor^[3] shivs4kids submitted an image of Duane "Dog" Chapman, the star of the reality series Bounty Hunter, with the caption "Hello? Yes, This is Dog" that received over 6,000 up votes within 6 weeks.

In early November 2011, another variation based on the same image was posted by Canvas user idontlikewords in a #Funny thread^[9], which spawned several dozens of derivatives.

On November 24th, YouTuber MrWeebl uploaded a video titled "Telephone Dog" animated by Something Awful goon Shmorky:

On December 12th, the humor blog Smosh^[2] published a compilation of "Hello, this is dog" images. Additional derivatives have spread to Tumblr^[5], FunnyJunk^[6] and A Facebook^[4] fan page has accumulated 753 "likes" as of December 14th, 2011.

Notable Examples

Derivatives

Search Interest

Search queries for "this is dog" "yes this is dog" and "hello this is dog" increased dramatically in October of 2011.

External References