Shocked Black Guy

Origin

‘Shocked Black Guy’, also called Surprised Black Guy, is a photograph of a man with his hands clasped behind his head, eyes bulging and mouth agape. The person is real: a comedian who goes by Jslutty online.

The source is a video uploaded by YouTuber FunnyMike on November 17th, 2020, titled ‘AALIYAH WROTE JAY AN APOLOGY LETTER & MARK WANT DESIREE AND HANNAH!’. It is a video about relationship drama among friends, and Jslutty, appearing alongside him, pulls the face at the 4:32 mark. In other words the image is not staged meme material but a moment that fell out of a chat video.

Spread

The video went up in 2020, but the picture only began to circulate as a reaction image a year and seven months later, in June 2022. The earliest documented use on Twitter is @inimloom1 replying to another tweet with the image on June 27th, 2022, after which it spread mainly on Twitter and Discord.

It broke out in late July 2022. On July 22nd, @wakeupkaii attached it to a tweet about thinking of the perfect comeback in the shower, drawing 610 retweets; on July 27th a gaming post by @kkenngou took 540 likes; and on August 21st a Japan-related post by @Based5656 reached 11,700 likes. The main derivative is ‘Shocked Miles Morales’, a redraw of the same expression as the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse character, posted by the artist @raflizi26 in early June 2023 and going viral shortly after.

Usage

The reaction to learning something you did not expect
Placed under a shocking sentence in a before-and-after arrangement to underline the surprise
A reply carrying the sense of having found out something you were not meant to know

The expression is broad enough to cover everything from genuine shock to hammed-up mock innocence. The raised hands read as a gesture of disbelief in their own right, which makes it carry more feeling than reaction images cropped to the face alone.