We’ve all been there. Someone shares a joke that just goes right over your head, but you notice that everyone else is laughing. You start to sweat and rapidly begin calculating whether it’s worth the risk of awkwardly chuckling along and praying they don’t notice you’re pretending. Or, you can just be honest and admit that you didn’t get it, which might turn you into the butt of the joke.
The internet, in particular, can be a cruel place when people don’t understand a punch line. But we’ve managed to find a safe space where members can share memes that they didn’t quite grasp without judgment, and others will kindly provide the necessary context. Below, you’ll find some of our favorite posts from r/PeterExplainsTheJoke. So enjoy scrolling through these silly pics, and if some of them go over your head, you’ll be able to understand by simply reading the captions!
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zeprfrew: The comic is saying that atheists behave in accordance with Jesus' teachings despite their lack of faith in religion or God while Christian Nationalists, whose beliefs and identity are fiercely Christian, act for the benefit of capitalism and directly contradict those same teachings.
The point of it is to show the irony that atheists behave as a good Christian should while those seeking to build a Christian society do the opposite.
EthanEpiale: Car salespeople are a species physically incapable of acknowledging the existence of a woman if a man is within 50 ft of her.
It’s funny. In Japan, if a man and woman go in together to buy a car, the salesperson focuses on the woman. Women in Japan generally control the family budget
Jammer_Jim: People expect anti-depressants to make them happy, but often what happens is the person feels no strong emotions at all. Or at least it seems that way after you've been having powerful mood swings for years. Depends on the underlying condition and the d***s used, but I've often heard it described as a "flattening" effect.
As I’m sure you know, we’re big fans of memes here at Bored Panda. And while these clever little images are meant to be shared and laughed at by friends and strangers alike, it’s impossible to understand them all. There are millions of memes floating around the internet, so if you encounter one that doesn’t make sense to you, have no fear. You can always post it on r/PeterExplainsTheJoke.
In this context, “Peter” is Peter Griffin, the beloved character from Family Guy. So members of the subreddit will post memes that they’ve stumbled upon with a caption along the lines of “Peter, what’s going on here?” And members will quickly swoop in and provide background info. We all have different life experiences, so we don’t all have access to the same knowledge. But there are an impressive 1.4 million members in this subreddit, so somebody is bound to understand each meme!
bremsspuren: There is no snow on that roof because it is significantly warmer than the neighbouring houses.
The joke is that in 2018, the most likely explanation is someone growing w**d under hot, hot grow lamps. In 2020, it's more likely to be someone running 100s of video cards to mine Bitcoin or similar (also very hot). But in 2022, power prices are so f**king high, only a lottery winner could afford to have a house that warm.
dangstaB01: Sight reading is a skill that students in orchestra or band tend to use; it involves looking at sheet music and imagining what it sounds like before playing it. The sheet says it’s Mary had a Little Lamb, but the notes don’t match up; more precisely it’s the music for Rick Astely’s Never Gonna Give You Up. The poster got pissed that they got Rick Rolled.
Delli-paper: Patients who are within minutes or hours of dying often feel much better and become lucid. Family members often see this as promising, but someone around so much death knows what's coming.
My grandmother had alzheimer's for well over 20 years. She hadn't been able to speak coherently for months, and hadn't recognised any of us at all for over 5 years or consistently for almost 10 years. Just before she died she knew who all of us were (including teenage me whom she hadn't recognised since I was about 5) and she knew what was happening. It wasn't a kindness.
I’m honestly not sure what’s more painful: not understanding a joke and having to ask for an explanation or telling a joke that doesn’t land because nobody got the punch line. Either way, someone is uncomfortable, embarrassed and struggling to find a way to keep the conversation going.
Now, the same rule doesn’t necessarily have to apply in real life, but it's a common practice in TV and film that you should never explain jokes to your audience. For example, if someone says an innuendo or a double entendre, the writers and actors must trust that the audience will get it. Overexplaining ruins the punch line, and all the humor is sucked from the situation. However, this only works if the joke actually made sense and was funny in the first place.
cyclone866: Pets, like cats and dogs, generally do not like taking pills/medicine. A typical way to get pets to take their meds is to cover the pill in a treat like peanut butter or shoving it into a piece of meat so they can't taste it. In this cartoon it is implied that the princess is intentionally telling knights to hunt down the dragon (common plot point of fantasy stories) and the dragon is eating all of the knights but this is being done intentionally to get the dragon to take their heartworm medicine.
Hot_Leading_5295: Nail artists are usually foreigners that talk about customers in their mother language so they can speak badly about customers in their faces (stereotypes).
If you do speak the language of the nail artists you get some great gossip.
ilovesnoppyandfriend: I’m guessing all they are assembling a team of billionaire “assassins” as these are all things that took billionaires out. Tbh idk someone let me know
CroatoanCurse: Billionaire assassin's is correct. Dude k**led a ceo of UHC. Oceangate k**led it's founder plus some others. And 1 very angry Russian aquarium orca as been teaching other orcas how to capsized yachts.
I'll quit my job right now and go work for that orca. That's a fish with a plan.
According to Meng Zhong at Womble Bond Dickinson, a joke isn’t funny if it requires an explanation. They explained that in 2022, Elon Musk created a rule on X (formerly Twitter) that all parody accounts had to explicitly label themselves as such. But many argued that this ruins the fun of those satirical pages.
Followers love wondering which accounts are ragebait and just for jokes and which ones are authentic. It’s also funny to engage with these accounts when you’re in on the joke, and it’s clear from some replies that not everyone understands. It’s almost like having an inside joke with thousands of strangers around the world.
Memer_Plus: Roman Petrus here. The show being referenced is the mockumentary Cunk on Earth, where the titular narrator humorously misinterprets history. The Romans left a lot from their history, including pottery fragments (which broke due to the long time period), which Cunk humorously says is caused by their clumsiness.
Glue_Snacc: My guess is, person has a dysfunctional, toxic family and thought that such a thing was normal, until they met girlfriend's parents and learned what a healthy family actually looks like.
Primary-Holiday-5586: So a woman died on Disney property after eating a dinner that she was assured was allergen free. Her husband sued. Disney said that when he signed up for a free one month trial of D plus he agreed to arbitration and couldn't sue.
On that note, many people love inside jokes. We create them with our families, our best friends, our partners, our colleagues and more. For example, when someone’s hungry at work, we always suggest “just having a few grapes and you’ll be fine,” which doesn’t sound like a joke at all out of context. And my family has a few sayings (such as, “Family, unite!”) that will instantly send us into fits of laughter. But these comments don’t make sense to anyone else. Memes can often function in the same way, only being understood by a select number of people.
loopingtohell: It's about the whole alpha, beta, delta, sigma bs that some men obsess over it.
To add, the person who published a book on this has spent most of his life trying to get the thing out of print because it's wrong. It was a study based on wolves in captivity that were unrelated and had been put together by the people running the zoo/preserve (I forget which). Basically imagine someone trying to discover how human society works purely by studying the inmates of a supermax prison. In reality packs are family units (or sometimes multiple that join up for a period of time to survive) and the 'alpha' wolves are just the parents, trying to keep everyone alive and stop last year's kids from bullying the babies etc. An alpha male in human terms should be a parent working cooperatively with his partner to raise multiple sets of kids.
natholemewIII: As a general rule, if someone has one crazy ex, the ex was probably crazy. If they describe every single ex as crazy, they are probably the one that's crazy. The doge in the middle is proud to be the first "nice guy" she's ever dated, but the one's around him know he's doomed to become another crazy ex, because the problem in all his new girlfriends past relationships was probably her. They know they can't do anything about it, because he has to learn for himself. Hope this helps!
b-monster666: I just learned this now, but apparently in the 18th century, Spanish missionaries in Venezuela, Columbia and Brazil ate capybara. They wrote to the pope, describing an animal that lived mostly in the water, had hair and scales and asked if they could eat it for lent. The pope, not knowing what a capybara was, and only having the description to go off of decided that the capybara was a fish, so it was okay to eat.
As much fun as inside jokes can be, they can also feel pretty isolating when you’re not in on the joke. So the courteous thing to do, if you share an inside joke in front of people who don’t get it, is to simply explain it! Laughing with loved ones is an excellent way to strengthen bonds and relieve stress. In fact, even laughing with people you don’t know might be a great way to make a new friend or sneak a little joy into your day! So if someone is curious about a meme you’ve shared or a joke you made, just be kind and explain it. There’s no need to shame them for not knowing the context!
CorpseGeneral: Some men calling themselves "passport bros" come over to SEA countries to find themselves a "traditional, submissive woman". Philippines and Thailand seem to be the more popular options.
Thelethargian: Engineers are paid for efficient and low cost solutions while architects are paid to (in the best of cases but not all) make structures that look good and serve their purpose often increasing the price of and decreasing the efficiency of construction. In this image the engineers solution is practical and efficient while the architects is better looking but is less practical. This is a generalization to better answer the joke.
Edit: this comment ignores the fact that architects and engineers often work hand in hand using both of their strengths. Practical doesn’t always mean beautiful, and we do benefit from beauty around us.
Captain_Tappa: There were protests in China, Tiananmen Square, in 1989, ended up with lots of casualties. And TS stands for Taylor Swift, born in 1989.
And apparently if you say TS 1989 on the internet in china, you lose internet access...
While memes can be about anything and everything, they are intended to bring people together and make us feel less alone. But the opposite can happen when we don’t understand what’s going on in an image. Who’s that character they’re referring to? What’s that item supposed to be? Are they referencing a band or a book? It can all become incredibly confusing. That’s why it’s so great for groups like r/PeterExplainsTheJoke to exist. You’ll never be confused about memes again!
PM_ME_YOUR_T**S80085: Bras for larger breasts are harder to open.
starlight_collector: Mining bitcoin takes a lot of electricity.
When I was a kid, we lived in a long narrow rowhouse (Kinda the equivalent of townhouse nowadays). We had renters on either side of us that we assumed didn't pay for their own electricity, because we rarely needed to turn on the heat in winter. We just relied on the heat coming though the walls from our neighbors.
Now, you might be thinking, “Who needs memes anyway? I can just communicate with words like a normal person.” To that I would say: Okay, you make a valid point. However, nowadays, memes are how plenty of people communicate. Theodora Blanchfield, AMFT, noted in a piece for Verywell Mind that memes have transformed the way we interact with each other.
“Although memes are packaged in quippy sayings or observations, at their core, they are still an exchange of ideas, just in a very easy-to-digest format,” she writes. “Whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, memes are an important part of modern discourse.” So let’s make sure everyone can enjoy them!
mklinger23: Autistic people have safe foods that are comforting. A lot of those are things that we grew up eating. That makes the foods familiar and therefore "safe".
rather, lots of autistic people have very strong, unovercomeable food preferences regarding the consistency - it must meet very specific criteria (must be crunchy, fruit can't be too soft and ripe, only one kind of food is eaten, etc), so this might show someone's preferred food in terms of both consistency and content
martopub11: There is a trend of women switching roles and saying phrases a male might say to a female: “I would’ve been in the NFL if it wasn’t for my career ending knee injury”.
ARatOnASinkingShip: Mountain goats can climb incredibly steep, almost vertical angles with ease. The frog thought he could escape the goat by climbing the wall. The frog was wrong. 92 degrees is a bit farfetched, but the point is that the wall isn't perfectly vertical, therefore the goat can climb it.
Have you learned anything new from this list, pandas? Or are you simply giggling at all of the memes, no explanation needed? Keep upvoting the pics that you find particularly clever, and let us know in the comments below which ones you needed a little help understanding. Then, you can find another Bored Panda article featuring hilarious and relatable memes right here!
Wordwind: She was an American painter who did a lot of flower paintings that could be seen as...reminiscent of sexy lady parts.
MothersMiIk: The United Health Care CEO shooter was recently apprehended in Pennsylvania in a McDonald’s after a tip was called in by another customer, contrary to the current belief that it was an employee. The meme is implying that the McDonald’s worker would also snitch on Anne Frank, who was hiding in an attic from the N*zis, because of the belief a McDonald’s employee snitched.
VerySecretHotdog: Nurses keep the death count low but the body count high.
Stressful jobs. None of our business how that stress is dealt with...
longtermbrit: Speaking as a millennial who is single, I feel like the guy on the ground watching that chopper fly off into the sunset. Dating apps are poison for anyone who isn't conventionally attractive, even if they do lead to relationships occasionally (I have a friend who met their spouse on there but they're both ridiculously attractive people inside and out) they're built with the intention of keeping people on the apps. That's not going to happen if they're good at pairing people off into relationships.
Add in a chronically online culture exacerbated by Covid lockdowns and a cost of living crisis pushing up the price of going out for a few drinks and you have a population of people who hardly ever go out so are less likely to meet organically and less able to interact with people in a flirty way.
And I include myself in this.
As a GenX married man, seeing what my single friends go thru has scarred me...
Morbos1000: I'm guessing they are young computer nerds and she is a hot girl. So a little flirting with them might convince them to give her sensitive info about the company. In the most extreme case passwords to infiltrate the whole computer system and take over the company ( given this is a joke).
TheEmperorOfDoom: Canadians have legal euthanasia.
Britols need to wait before getting medicine.
Amercanus have to pay.
Adept_Lemon2481: It's a joke about how metal music has a dramatic unreadable font. More unreadable and dramatic the font the more niche and metal the band.
this post reminds one of a contest called Completely Unreadable Band Logo of the Week on one of the many websites writing about heavy metal music - if you managed to decipher the diarrhoea looking splat, you got goodies.. the bottom logo is similar to a logo for the band Xavlegbmaofffassssitimiwoamndutroabcwapwaeiippohfffx, which apparently first letters of the band's full name..
AdmiralAkbar1: You can find the original twitter thread here. TLDR you can tell what kinds of d***s the writers were getting prescribed based on how trippy stuff is.
Btw, you can't see the xitter thread without logging in to xitter. And that's not gonna make me make one, so Akbar didn't clarify much
red-D-Thor: Guy is Johnny sins.
Does p**no.
Does roleplay of sometimes astronaut, sometimes doctor,... all sorts of professions.
LovecraftianKing: Men don’t get compliments. So the bottom is something completely unrelated because there is no stock reaction to men being complimented.
NoTePierdas: A new sonic weapon was unveiled in Serbia against protestors.
So, the problem is that it is going to be a new "non-lethal" weapon. Non-lethal weapons have the problem of making people at home feel okay about it while causing severe problems to people it's used on.
Sonic weapons and stun grenades absolutely f**king deafen you and pierce your eardrums. Rubber bullets will still break bones, and can totally k**l you, they're just less likely to k**l you. Tear gas causes severe respiratory distress.
As a guy whose seen stun grenades used, I'd kinda prefer if they just fired over protestors' heads or something. My ears haven't stopped ringing since I was 13. I can't sleep without a cocktail of medicine.
Sonic weapons, as far as I know, can't be defended against deafening you by wearing earpro. The equivalent amount of sound is multiple .45 ACP rounds going off inside of you, radiating throughout your body.
Whoa, I remember reading about them being used. My gut was telling me something isn't right here. Maybe if the people with the power, access and capacity to decide how life is for the rest of us stopped being so shifty, selfish and destructive we wouldn't have to emote loudly in the streets. CAN YOU HEAR US NOW OR DO WE GOTTA START BREAKING S**T? Any time I see protests, anywhere in the world that have high emotions and drastic actions like fighting and physical violence I think, well of course this happened. A system designed to consume and hoard, and deny access and lock up necessities and consolidate power to, historically speaking, too many people that operated off of pure ego and greed can only go 1 of 2 ways. Either the system eats itself into annihilation and takes everything down with it. Or, we see the system with clear eyes so we may course correct before it's too late. It's time. 💫🤍✌️🤙🤘🫂
SoSpecialName: Topology (hole science) joke. Socks, by topological standards, have no holes.
Then why would a cup of coffee? Are they saying because the sock tip isn't flat like a mug? That seems dumb. Or someone f'ed up.
Mammoth-Magician-778: It’s a scene from The Mist. Towards the end of the film, the man pictured is held up in a car with a number of others, including his son. Believing that soon they’ll all die, he k**ls them all, but doesn’t have a bullet for himself. After k**ling them, the mist begins to clear and the military starts driving through.
The tragedy is that if he had waited just a few more moments, he wouldn’t have had to k**l his son. Now he has to live with it for the rest of his life.
JustSimple97: Comedian will interact with them and ask many potentially uncomfortable questions. Depend on your ability to come up with clever things fast this may work in your favor or against you.
West-Cricket-9263: The first picture represents punching drywall, which is what most American houses have. It's a costly and ultimately pointless endeavor but mostly harmless. The second picture illustrates what happens when you punch an actual wall.
JobiWanKenobi47: The joke is that people who act funny and don’t pay attention in class don’t get higher paying jobs making them work at earlier hours rather than a 9-5.
Honestly, there's no shame in any of it. Different people are cut out for different things.
flashpoint71: These were sold in vending machine inside break rooms, usually at manufacturing plants. They were usually in the vending machine that rotates. You have to open the little door and pull it out.
Edit: These were a great choice at 7 am, first thing In the morning, because you didn’t get home from the bars before 3:30 am.
Berkamin: This is Ramanujan, the Indian mathematician who got mystical revelations of mind blowing mathematical theorems.
Many of his mathematical conjectures were later proven true, which is baffling because it leaves you wondering how he was even able to make such conjectures in the first place. According to him he had mystical dreams about math. (Or ‘maths’ as he might have said, since he did his academic work in the UK.) That’s his source for these conjectures
Your dreams really are a magical place. He could access the knowledge of the cosmos.
Bulky-Party-8037: There was a clip of him and P Diddy from years ago. So likely he was a member of those freak out parties that everyone including Homeland Security is concerned about leading people to think he was groomed by him, or worse.
Using the word gay as an insult, is the most ridiculous thing ever. Some people think it's just an innocent insult, but it's really not. You're basically saying that being gay is so horrible or disgusting, that if you want to insult someone, you'll compare them to a gay person. Don't ever do that, unless you actually think being gay is a bad thing, just choose to insult with any other word. There are hundreds of insults that you could use, just use any random other one.
CapablePersonality21: There's a trend on tiktok on women expressing little traits on men that gives them the "ick", which is disgust and unattractiveness for them. Eventually it got so ridiculous that even the most mundane act would give them the ick, things like feeling cold, walk in a certain way, ordering some kind of food, cooking, etc. There's a guy on tiktok/instagram that lists everything that give women them the ick and it became comical instantly.
Ash_an_bun: The fade and an actually groomed beard are regarded as the type of hairstyles used by Caucasian males to indicate they would like to have relations with women of African descent.
CartographerKey4618: The backrooms are a fictional location of infinite rooms that you supposedly access by glitching yourself or being glitched out of reality. The rooms are liminal spaces, spaces that are eerily empty and are portrayed with featureless carpets, white walls, and older fluorescent lighting. If there is something inside of a backroom that seems innocent, like a soda machine, chances are it's some kind of eldrich horror trying to lure you in. More than likely, it's not a coincidence our thirsty protagonist ran into a pepsi machine.
AndTheOscarGoesTo-:
(deep breath) Here we go, in Zootopia, Disney made several significant changes to the plot before its release, altering the film's tone and themes. Originally, all predators were supposed to wear control collars that shocked them when they felt strong emotions, symbolizing societal oppression, but this concept was deemed too dark for a family movie. The initial story also presented a bleaker view of discrimination, with prey animals as the oppressors of predators, which was shifted to focus on cooperation and understanding instead. The main villain was Initially going to be Mayor Swinton, a pig representing societal control, but was changed to Bellwether, a sheep whose betrayal added a surprising twist. Nick Wilde's backstory was originally darker, emphasizing his childhood trauma from prejudice, but this was toned down for a lighter narrative. The first draft included a storyline where Nick dealt with a virus causing savage behavior but managed to control it, this was simplified in the final version to highlight themes of acceptance. (Sigh of relief)
Amazing Disney finds anything too dark for a family movie considering what they put in .
swinkyy_x: It’s basically joking about how guys might say they don’t have a favorite color, but if they do, it’s not just “green”, its something super specific like “the deep green of moss after it rains” or “the exact shade of emerald dust.” Guys don’t go broad; they go weirdly niche.
That's bullpuckey. Everyone knows the best green is Kawasaki lime...
Psyberpunk777: Small cylinder means his w**ner.
I rather wish this one hadn't been explained. Especially as my mind went straight to tweezers
Armisael2245: I seen people say the algorithm is promoting violent, h***y and generally unhinged videos.
Oh I detest it when the claim that this is happening just because of the algorithm, oh the algo did it. Someone had to make that algorithm. Or do I understand even less about tech than I thought?
I think some of the explanations left me as confused as the original meme.
I think some of the explanations left me as confused as the original meme.
