Guy Sipping Beer on a Couch

Origin

‘Guy Sipping Beer on a Couch’ is a meme made from a single stock photograph. The original was uploaded to Shutterstock by user Nomad_soul on February 20th, 2011: a man in a striped T-shirt sits on a couch with a plate of crisps in his lap, one hand tipping a beer bottle to his mouth and the other aiming a TV remote. It also goes by ‘Couch Potato Sipping Beer’.

For more than a decade afterwards the picture was nothing but serviceable filler in blog posts and articles about laziness, staying in, and weekends. The stiffness peculiar to stock photography — nobody actually drinks beer in that pose — is what later became the joke.

Spread

It turned into a meme thirteen years after upload, at the end of December 2024. On December 25th, 2024, X user @Melodic_Lemons3 posted the photo as a reaction image, captioned to the effect that this was how the past four months had gone thanks to a terrible job market; within a week it passed 11,000 reposts and 163,000 likes.

The decisive turn came four days later. On December 29th, 2024, X user @art_retr0 posted the image with the prompt ‘draw your OC or your fave like this’, converting a reaction image into a drawing challenge. A redraw trend took hold, and on December 30th, 2024 a piece by @nurtleteckye putting Wayne from the game Hylics in the pose gathered over 2,500 reposts and 19,000 likes in a single day.

Usage

• Describing, self-deprecatingly, a state of doing absolutely nothing
• As a reaction image summing up a listless stretch of time, as in ‘my last few months’
• The redraw challenge: putting your own character or a favourite in the same pose

The structure of this meme is that one photograph does two jobs. Posted as is, it is a self-deprecating reaction image; keep only the pose and swap the figure and it becomes a fan-art format. As the latter grew, users appeared who had met the redraws without ever seeing the original stock photo.

Sources

• Know Your Meme, ‘Guy Sipping Beer on a Couch Stock Image’ — the Shutterstock upload by Nomad_soul of February 20th, 2011; @Melodic_Lemons3’s post of December 25th, 2024 (11,000 reposts, 163,000 likes); @art_retr0’s redraw prompt of December 29th; @nurtleteckye’s Hylics fan art of December 30th (2,500 reposts, 19,000 likes)
• Know Your Meme, ‘Couch Potato Sipping Beer Stock Image’ image entry — the stock photo as it circulates
• Know Your Meme image gallery — a collection of character redraws including Wolverine and Goro Majima