User:The Tom/scratch/HA! HA! guy

"HA! HA! guy" (also known as the Ha! Ha! Quaker) is an internet meme that first gained prominence in July 2005. HA! HA! guy is an engraving of an 18th-century Quaker or Anglican minister used in an advertisement in an unknown 19th-century newspaper (with the words "HA! HA!"). The website hetemeel.com enabled would-be wags to automatically generate two subsequent lines of text below the image for humourous effect. The relative ease by which new iterations of HA! HA! guy could be generated prompted an incredibly rapid spread and penetration of the meme, especially on the website Fark.com.

Within a week of circulation on Fark it had become perhaps the most ubitiquous cliché in the site's history, with assorted iterations appearing on virtually all discussion threads. Unlike other Fark clichés such as Admiral Akbar, HA! HA! guy has thus far been fairly broadly lauded for remaining funny even after reaching a ludicrous degree of overexposure.

The precise source of HA! HA! guy's humour, like most memes, remains hard to peg. The custom portion of the text generally appears formatted as two lines, the first in a slightly smaller font than the second, which allows jokes to be phrased in a natural leadup-punchline manner. Snippets of rap lyrics have proven to be particularly well-suited to appropriate for usage below HA! HA! guy. Many HA! HA! guy iterations make liberal use of leet.

In September 2008, Goodwill sold a painting entitled "Midland Man 1874" which is identical to the popular HA! HA! guy. This link will expire, so this sentence can be removed after Wikipedia has sourced this tidbit of extra information.
 * HA! HA! guy painted original image

In the Goodwill link there is an image on the back of the painting with the written cursive text: "This man who resigned a Midland position in 1874 and got his pay."