On May 28, 2016, a gorilla named Harambe was shot and killed by Cincinnati Zoo officials after a 3-year-old boy fell into the animal’s enclosure and the child’s life appeared to be at risk. Some argued in the aftermath that Harambe shouldn’t have been shot; others questioned why we as a society were more sensitive to the life of an animal than that of a child, specifically a black child. Then Harambe memes took hold of the internet.
In these memes, Harambe was depicted as a legend and a hero. He was celebrated as a symbol of resistance against every awful thing that happened in 2016. In one, he's shown in the clouds with Prince, Muhammad Ali, and David Bowie; in another, he's seen climbing the Trump Tower "in protest of his death." Song lyrics were changed in his honor. (To the tune of blink-182's "All the Small Things," for example: Say it ape so / I will not go / Harambe got shot / Carry me home.)
Among the loudest, or at least the most R-rated, of these memes was “dicks out for Harambe.” The catchphrase is widely attributed to Brandon Zaboklicki, a 22-year-old advertising major at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee whose tweets are usually about bagging groceries for minimum wage under the handle @SexualJumanji (he has more than 16,000 followers); and Brandon Wardell, a 24-year-old standup comedian in L.A. who popularized the meme by posting a “dicks out” Vine with actor Danny Trejo (Wardell has more than 50,000 followers).
Here, the guys discuss the origin of “dicks out” and why they began to distance themselves from it almost immediately. (Disclosure: I am acquainted with both Brandons, perhaps not surprisingly through social media.)
How did you come up with “dicks out”?
Zaboklicki: In the early days of Harambe dying, everyone was remixing songs to be about him and I was doing a stream on Twitch [a video platform for gamers] where I was playing sad songs — Avril Lavigne and stuff like that — and I called it a “Harambe DJ Tribute” session. People were typing on the chat and one dude said, “We coming into the Cincinnati Zoo with them dicks out for Harambe.” I laughed.
Then a couple days later, I remembered that. In my head, when someone says “dicks out,” I’ve always thought about it like "dicks" meant "guns" — I’ve heard it in rap music before. I was like, “Mom, can you go to the store and buy me a replica gun?” (I don’t have a car.) “It’s for a tweet.” She just rolls her eyes every time I say [something] is for a tweet. So it took a week for her to go get this. When I finally got it, I took a picture with it and tweeted. It got 250 likes and, like, 50 retweets. It wasn’t a big deal.
It blew up when Brandon Wardell tweeted a Vine of Danny Trejo saying it. How did that happen?
Wardell: [I was at the] UCB show “Put Your Hands Together” and [actor] Danny Trejo was there. And I did a bit where I had them play [Wiz Khalifa’s] “See You Again” and started a “dicks out for Harambe” chant, and then Danny Trejo came up to me and was like, “Oh my god. Great bit. I got to steal that bit.” And I was like, “Oh, sure, but first can you make this Vine really quick?”
Why do you think the meme caught on?
Zaboklicki: I think the idea of a gorilla being a freedom symbol [appealed to people] in a way. Cecil the lion [also] became kind of a cult meme, where he was a symbol of power to people. I mean, in the current state of the world, people are always looking for that one thing to rally around, and it’s really easy to rally around a gorilla because you can’t look up a gorilla’s internet history. We tried with Ken Bone and that backfired.
Wardell: I didn’t think that it would become so big.
Zaboklicki: It evolved into a college campus type thing, like a frat-bro thing where people were chanting “dicks out for Harambe.”
Wardell: It’s very annoying that fucking frat dudes go around yelling [it] — dudes that would’ve probably called me a “faggot” in high school. Bros think dicks are funny and they love beating memes to the ground. So it’s a good intersection of those two things.
Zaboklicki: And then the racist people started using it and I was just like, “Oh no.”
The meme became controversial because the racist "alt-right" started using it, including Milo Yiannopoulos, who got kicked off Twitter for leading a racist attack against Leslie Jones. The "alt-right" used Harambe to make racist comparisons between gorillas and black people, including Jones. When did you realize the meme had been co-opted?
Wardell: A week after Fourth of July, I was at dinner with a few friends and a bunch of people texted me about how Milo tweeted, “My dick is out for Harambe.”
Zaboklicki: I instantly DMed Brandon or texted him, and was like, “Hey, we can’t say it anymore.”
Wardell: This is not even a month later. I remember I was on my way to Comic-Con and [director] Jack Wagner was like, “You should try to end the meme and publicly denounce it.” And he posted something on his Instagram, like, “We need to shoot the dicks out meme.” And I posted something about it on Twitter around same time.
But it was already too big for me — you can’t end a meme. You can’t really kill a meme.
Did you panic? Were you worried about backlash?
Zaboklicki: I could see it coming on the horizon because people started using Harambe in a derogatory manner. And I was like, “It’s gonna start coming back to me soon.” So I actually deleted the picture and the tweet, but it’s saved on the KnowYourMeme page forever, so I can never fully escape it.
Wardell: Kumail Nanjiani [a comedian I'm friendly with] was tweeting the idea that Harambe was always a racist meme:
I talked to him about it and he was like, “You must feel like the guy who created the atom bomb.” I [explained that] it was always innocuous on my end. It kind of just got stolen by shit-heads.
Have you felt any repercussions in your day-to-day life?
Zaboklicki: It’s pretty crazy because most people don’t know it’s me that did that. It’s so undercover. When I hear people say it in real life and I’m near them, I’m always worried they’re gonna recognize me from the tweet. [I avoid the backlash of having created it. I get mentions like, “This is your fault,” tagging me in any Harambe thing. And I’m like, “It’s not my fault, I did one tweet about it.”
Wardell: I did some show in Boston where I was talking about how I created “dicks out for Harambe,” or popularized it, and people in the crowd didn’t believe me. They think it just came out of nowhere.
Do you think it’s a racist meme?
Wardell: I don’t think it’s on me to feel any guilt about what racist people did with the meme, you know? It got co-opted by racists, but I don’t think it started out as a racist meme.
Zaboklicki: My entire timeline, all day, every day, was doing Harambe jokes. But once [Yiannopoulos] tweeted what he did, they were like, “Cut the shit, it’s racist, and you’re all racist for doing it.” And I was like, “Oh, I mean, I guess?” I could see where they were coming from, but that wasn’t the reaction when it first started. I’m trying to learn what’s OK to tweet and what’s not OK to tweet. So that’s a step in the right direction.
Do you wish you could take it back?
Wardell: Would I? Would I just never tweet “dicks out for Harambe?” Maybe, yeah. I remember when I posted the Trejo Vine, I felt a rush. I got a bunch of people hitting me up at once being like, “Oh, that was amazing,” like, “Holy shit.” But then it did get super out of control. So, yeah, maybe I would take it back. It’s not really a hill I’m trying to die on.
Zaboklicki: I hate being a meme, even on a small level. I hate it. I don’t want my life to be just this one moment I had. Several moments, sure, two, three moments, cool. But, literally, the Damn Daniel kids are going to be summed up by that moment their whole life. That dude’s going to be 43 working an office job at Vans and his boss is going to be like, “Damn, Daniel.” And I would just walk out.
Brandon Wardell and Brandon Zaboklicki were interviewed separately. Their interviews have been combined and edited for clarity.
The guys behind "Dicks Out for Harambe" are part of Cosmopolitan.com’s list of 2016's most fascinating people on the internet. See the rest of the list:
2. Huda Kattan
3. Simone Biles
5. Joanne the Scammer: Branden Miller
8. Ryan Lochte and his fiancée, Kayla Rae Reid
9. #MrStealYourGrandma: Irvin Randle
10. Russian Leo: Roman Burtsev
11. Janice Joostema
12. Chewbacca Mom: Candace Payne
13. The Damn Daniel Boys: Daniel Lara and Josh Holz
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