OO해봐 OO하면 그만이야

Origin

The format started with a post on the US Stocks minor gallery of DCInside in January 2022, when stock and cryptocurrency prices were falling day after day amid a pile-up of bad news. According to Namuwiki, what actually spread it was a January 22nd, 2022 post — the day the Nasdaq and Bitcoin fell hard together — in which a user taunted the market to "go ahead and crash further" in the title and attached a photo of a clown.

The joke lives in the drop between title and body. The title sounds like someone talking big because they have something up their sleeve; click through, and the body says that the only thing left to do is give up entirely. Paired with a beaming clown photo that clashes completely with the tone, it took on a cult following. Because the body frames a self-destructive ending as a punchline, discomfort has trailed this meme alongside the laughter from the start.

The clown image is a stock photograph by the German photographer Alexander Raths. On DCInside, the image is thought to have been established by a user who, in the second half of 2021, ran repeated posts on the public-enterprise minor gallery using it to mock people who had failed hiring rounds.

Spread

The market itself was the backdrop for its spread. People who had taken losses used it on themselves, and the form hardened into one sentence carrying both a taunt at others and self-mockery. It then moved beyond the stock and crypto boards to other communities, and because the clown photo travelled with it, it was also called the "clown meme."

As it spread, the original self-destructive punchline was largely softened. What mostly survives is the skeleton — "go on and do OO, if it goes wrong that's that" — used to express the attitude that there is nothing left to lose even in the worst case.

How it is used

• To express resignation, self-mockingly, in the face of a loss or a failure
• As an ironic taunt aimed at a situation, daring it to get worse
• As a joke exaggerating the posture of having nothing left to lose
• As a post format that inflates expectations in the title and undercuts them in the body

Sources

• Namuwiki, "○○하면 그만이야" — the January 22nd, 2022 US Stocks minor gallery origin, the title-versus-body reversal, the source of the clown image and its earlier use on the public-enterprise minor gallery in late 2021
• Namuwiki, "US Stocks minor gallery" — the character of the board the meme came from