Monkey Thinking Meme
Monkey thinking memes are reaction images built on a primate caught mid-thought or mid-glance, most often a Japanese television puppet whose eyes flick toward the camera. They label the moment when you are visibly processing something and losing.
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The monkey thinking meme collection
Every frame below does one of three jobs: a face that is thinking, a face caught thinking, or a face that has visibly stopped thinking. Tap any tile to load it into the editor with the text boxes already placed, so you can test one caption against three frames in a minute.
The monkey frames and the human frames are not interchangeable, which is the part most collections skip. The monkeys are passive: they receive something and do nothing with it. The human faces are active, trying and failing. Joke about effort, use Math Lady or Confused Gandalf. Joke about no effort at all, use the puppet or the orangutan.
Which one to use
The puppet sits at the top because it is what most people came for. The rest of the table exists because reaching for it every time is the fastest way to kill a thread.
| The situation | Use | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| You have just been caught staring | Monkey Puppet | Look, then look away. The punchline is being seen, so it needs a witness. |
| Someone is shouting and none of it is going in | Tiger Yelling At Pondering Monkey | The monkey does not react at all, which beats any comeback you could write. |
| One need, zero other thoughts | Where Monkey | Cut the caption to two or three words. Full sentences kill this one instantly. |
| Pretending to follow a technical explanation | Math Lady | The equations already say lost, so name only the subject you are lost in. |
| Circular reasoning, no further questions | Math Is Math | For tautologies. It is like that because it is like that, and nobody will explain. |
| You walked into a room and forgot why | Confused Gandalf | A face that is normally certain, briefly not. That gap is the joke. |
| Something that should be here is not here | Confused Travolta | Reads as searching, not thinking. Best for missing objects and empty rooms. |
| A statement you can neither argue with nor accept | Jackie Chan Confused | Hands up, eyebrows up. Strong enough to post with no text at all. |
| The plan made sense until you said it out loud | Confused Lebowski | Slow bafflement, not sharp confusion. For lazy chaos, not urgent problems. |
| Guessing what somebody else is thinking | I Bet He’s Thinking About Other Women | Top box is the assumption, bottom box is the mundane truth. Two boxes, never three. |
| The same joke but kinder | He’s Probably Thinking About Girls | Same beat, softer read. Pick one of the pair, never both in a thread. |
| You only need the aftermath | Monkey Looking Away | Single panel, for replies where the setup is already on the screen. |
| It has to survive a group chat thumbnail | Puppet Monkey Looking Away | The tight crop survives being shrunk. The wide version turns to mush. |
Captions that work
Two rules carry this set. The top box has to be a situation, not a feeling, because the picture already supplies the feeling. And the bottom box should be shorter than the top one, because a long payoff reads as an explanation.
- meetingswhen they ask if there are any questions and you finally look up
- workme pretending to follow the shared screen my brain playing a song on loop
- messagingthe second you realise it did not go to the group it went to them
- workreading the whole email a third time the deadline was Tuesday
- schoolwhen the teacher says this is on the exam and you have never seen it before
- moneyopening my banking app after the weekend closing my banking app after the weekend
- moneyeleven minutes of someone explaining crypto where money
- socialhearing my own name across the room pretending very hard that I did not
- foodthe recipe says fold gently nobody has ever explained what that means
- petsmy dog barking at absolutely nothing at 3am me, sitting up, doing this
- socialwhen the group chat goes quiet after my joke slowly looking away
- socialwhen they say we need to talk and then say nothing for ten seconds
Where monkey thinking memes come from
The puppet is the anchor of the whole subject, and its history is better documented than most. It comes from the Japanese series Okiku Naru Ko, a long-running programme for children that Know Your Meme records as airing from 7 April 1959 to 18 March 1988. A Spanish-language dub, Ninos en Crecimiento, began airing in Latin America on 13 April 1984, which is why the character is known in much of the world by his dub name, Pedro, rather than the original Kento.
Here is the detail that changes how you read the format: the famous glance at the camera never happened on television. It was made in Photoshop. On 5 May 2016 a Facebook user named Daniel Flores edited the puppet in the second frame so that its eyes turned toward the lens, and posted the pair to a private Facebook group for students choosing lecturers at the University of Lima. The caption was about staring at a crush and being noticed. The meme circulated through Spanish-language communities for roughly three years before it broke into English-language feeds, where it became a mainstream reaction image around 2019.
That explains how the format behaves. Frame one is genuine footage of a puppet looking sideways at nothing. Frame two is an edit whose only purpose is eye contact. The format was built backwards from its punchline, which is why captions that put the punchline on top always feel wrong.
The orangutan is a separate lineage. On 19 January 2017 BBC Breakfast ran a segment on the animatronic camera animals built for the nature series Spy in the Wild, and the studio shot of the orangutan on the sofa circulated for years without a caption sticking to it. In December 2019 a Reddit user replaced the presenters with copies of the orangutan and added the words where banana. Worth knowing before you file it under monkey: an orangutan is an ape.
Math Lady is the Brazilian actress Renata Sorrah playing Nazare Tedesco in the telenovela Senhora do Destino. Know Your Meme dates the earliest recorded use of the clip as a reaction image to 31 October 2013 on a music forum, years before anyone added the floating equations. Those arrived around 2016, so the version everyone recognises is a remix of a remix.
Limits and etiquette
Four matched templates are not in the grid. Three were frames of Black men used as generic confused reactions. Monkey imagery has a long, well documented history as racist abuse, and placing photographs of Black men under a heading containing the word monkey reproduces that juxtaposition whatever anyone intends. The fourth was a redundant confused-celebrity frame.
That history is also the one hard rule here: do not aim a monkey frame at a photograph, a name or an account belonging to a real person. Monkey chants and monkey images directed at Black public figures, footballers in particular, are a recognised form of racist abuse. A frame that is harmless about your own inability to read an email is not harmless pointed at someone.
Beyond that, the honest problem here is saturation. The puppet has been reposted for years, so the picture does no work on its own. Anything captionable as when I am confused has already been posted thousands of times. These frames only earn a laugh when the top box is specific enough that nobody else could have written it.
All frames here are third-party material, hosted for captioning only. Rights holders can use the takedown policy at /dmca/.
Frequently asked questions
What is the monkey in the monkey thinking meme?
It is a puppet character from the Japanese series Okiku Naru Ko, a programme for children that aired from 1959 to 1988. Know Your Meme gives the character name as Kento, and Pedro in the Spanish dub.
Is the side eye glance real footage?
No. The frame where the puppet looks straight at the camera was made in Photoshop in 2016. The original broadcast does not contain that look.
What is the where monkey meme?
It is a photoshopped still from a BBC Breakfast segment broadcast on 19 January 2017. The animal is an orangutan, which is an ape rather than a monkey.
Which format works if I only want one panel?
Monkey Looking Away. It gives you the aftermath without the setup frame, which suits replies where the context is already on the screen.
Who is the woman in the confused lady frame?
She is the Brazilian actress Renata Sorrah, playing Nazare Tedesco in the telenovela Senhora do Destino. The floating equations were added by other people years later.
How many text boxes do these formats need?
Two for the paired formats and one for the single monkey frames. Adding a third box almost always weakens the joke rather than sharpening it.
Is the monkey thinking meme played out?
It is heavily reposted, so the picture alone carries very little now. A specific caption about a specific situation still lands.
Can I use these on a photo of a real person?
Do not. Monkey imagery has a long history of being used as racist abuse, so aiming one at a person can read that way whatever you meant by it.