The end of spring in 2010 was a quiet time in Keanu Reeves’s career. The Matrix and its sequels were long over. The John Wick trilogy was still a twinkle in some script doctor’s eye. Reeves was working on an independent project that was destined to never really pop for him. At some point that spring, a photographer named Ron Asadorian took a photo of him in a V-neck and blazer sitting on a bench, cheap coffee on the street below him, sandwich in hand, staring at nothing in front of him. His posture wasn’t defeated necessarily, but resigned, as if his entire body was sighing, “Ham and cheese again? Every day it’s fucking ham and cheese.” Splash News, an international photo agency that supplies the internet with the bulk of celebrity paparazzi photos, posted it on its site, ready for a willing tabloid to purchase and publish.
Then in June of that year, a Reddit user named rockon4life45 posted the photo to the site. At the time, when Twitter was still a fledgling media site and Reddit wasn’t quite so feral as it is today, the upvote model provided ever-updating popularity contest results for online content. Most news organizations looked to the front page of Reddit to determine what the internet was talking about any given day. The meme arrived in two parts: Over the first image of Reeves staring at his sandwich is the text, “I really like acting.” And over the second, he’s chewing a bite of the sandwich and it reads, “Because when I act, I’m no longer me.” The meme was upvoted to the front page and a sad-man meme was born.
From there, the meme found life mostly in the form of photoshopping Reeves next to things that could be making him sad, like a slumped panda or 30 to 40 cats. By October, New York magazine’s Vulture told him about his internet legacy. He seemed to take it well. “So they like take paparazzi pictures and recontextualize them? Funny,” Reeves said, adding, “But given the scope and scale of what can happen out there, that sounds like an all right one. It sounds conceptually funny.”
The galaxy of conceptually funny was expandable, essential for any meme, which is what Sad Keanu swiftly inspired. Any man caught looking sad could be a sad man, and any photo of a sad man could be photoshopped into near infinite situations. There was a Weird Al version from an airport (2015), and a Joe Biden version, in which the former vice president stared out the Oval Office windows as Barack Obama met with—get this—the then president of Ukraine (2014). My personal favorite, if one were into awarding superlatives, is when Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan morosely rode Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland (2015). He looked so deeply dispirited that not even the magic of Disney, nor the thrill of applied physics, could pull him out of it. (It should be said that Crying Michael Jordan is not a sad-man meme, but in a category unto itself, not just because it precedes the bounds of end-of-decade lists—it surfaced in 2009—but because of the tears. The emotion evoked in the sad-man memes is one withheld. It’s steely and it’s existential, a despondency that comes long after crying. The farce of male grit hilariously laid bare.)
The end of Reeves]s sad-man tale was basically positive, as BoJack Horseman, the Netflix cartoon that expertly skewers every wrinkle in the entertainment industry, aptly parodied just this past season. In the show, Hollywood agent Princess Carolyn launched a sad-dog meme on behalf of her client, the perennially stoked Mr. Peanutbutter, a golden retriever incapable of expressing negativity, who was in hot water after a cheating scandal threatened to turn his show, Birthday Dad, into a flop. The meme worked so well that he became the face of destigmatized depression. To all who are unfamiliar with the show, please rest assured that all of this makes complete sense in the BoJack world.
Back in the real one, circa 2010, the original Sad Keanu Reddit thread soon doubled as a repository for stories of the actor doing acts of good, big and small, by people who claimed to have some connection to him. The stories aren’t verified, but they don’t read as apocrypha either. Reeves is a good guy. It’s sad that he’s allegedly sad. The meme worked like an unsolicited Kickstarter: A Time story under the rubric “That Viral Thing” recounted stories of people who seemed genuinely ready to donate money in the name of Reeves’s happiness. The author interviewed the man who started the Facebook group called Cheer Up Keanu with tens of thousands of members. It was all very sweet. (Regardless of whether his inner life matched the image, it continued to be easy to cheer for Keanu, even as his success multiplied through the rest of the decade; whatever leg up he got on the rest of the world, it always felt earned because it was framed within this perceived sadness).
The phenomenon doesn’t always work so well. Take Ben Affleck, who pushed the genre forward into new and thrilling territory beginning in 2016, a very hard year for him and for so, so many of us. He is sad in a car. He is sad on a beach. He is sad smoking a cigarette. He is sad vaping. He could be found “smoking through the pain of existence,” according to the Cut. He is sad in a junket video even. Somebody superimposed “The Sound of Silence” over the footage, zooming in on his face as his thoughts appear to turn inward. It’s devastating. (Actually, he’s fine, he tweeted after the New Yorker’s Naomi Fry collected the internet flotsam around Sad Affleck together in a 2018 essay. “Thick skin bolstered by garish tattoos,” he wrote.)
Unlike Reeves, Affleck seems to be the artist of his own pain. He and Jennifer Garner, the mother of their three kids, divorced, and then he made some ill-advised dating choices, including, at one point, his children’s nanny. In 2017, at the height of Harvey Weinstein’s defenestration, the actor had to address a past on-camera groping incident. Sometime in the years prior, he got a bad tattoo, the one he referred to in the tweet above. It is not small.
Affleck has spoken openly about his struggle with alcoholism and has been spotted out in the world with his sober coach, which has garnered some heartfelt sympathy. But the Sad Affleck photos never inspired any of it. In them, he is always slightly bedraggled with tired, usually closed eyes, always looking like he’s breathing out stale air that he’s been holding in for a long time. They are an over-the-top caricature of the anxiety that, as the decade winds down, seems to live within all internet-dwellers’ ids. What are we looking for in our hours of scrolling anyway? What misery are we trying to ease?
Over its 10 years of existence, the sad-man meme has gone from sympathy-inducing—a collective, “We’re all in this together!”—to something much harder, something more revoltingly familiar. Affleck’s thousand-yard stare makes one laugh in the same way hitting one’s funny bone does. The recognition is abrupt, and we laugh almost despite ourselves. It’s been a long decade, and every micro-generation gets the sad man it deserves.
There is hope, though. Reeves had a banner year in 2019. A GQ profile featured a riff on whether or not Reeves is lonely, but everyone used the occasion of Reeves holding hands on the red carpet with a human woman to celebrate the end, or at least truncation of, his “sadness.” The end of this decade marks a happy one for the sad man. And so maybe with time and work, there will be a happy ending for us all.
— Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale talk about their life, love, and kids
— Inside the royal showdown over Prince Andrew
— Will the Queen really retire when she turns 95?
— How Prince Andrew’s scandal is affecting the rest of the royal family
— Céline Dion is still an adventurous, but more subtle, dresser
— From the Archive: Lee Radziwill looks back at her and Jacqueline Kennedy’s deeply intertwined lives
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story.
