Why Do They Call It Oven? is a copypasta and meme pulled from a Garfield comic panel that features a nonsensical rant about an oven. What started off as a mistyped tweet launched many laughs.
Meme basics
- Meme Creator: @YashichiDSF/X
- Meme Type: Copypasta, Macro
- First Appearance: August 2013
- Origin Source: Twitter
- Peak Popularity: February 2021
Where did the ‘Why Do They Call It Oven?’ meme come from?
Why Do They Call It Oven? began as a series of typos in an Aug. 31, 2013, tweet by @YashichiDSF. The text reads, “Why do they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food.”
The tweet’s 1:28 a.m. timestamp, indicating the early hours of a Saturday morning, led many to conclude that the OP was either tired or out partying when they fired off the mistyped tweet.
While there were some initial interactions, the copypasta’s spread began in 2014, when it started to appear in niche forum comments online and in the bios of users on various sites. Its first appearance on Reddit was in November 2016.
Meme popularity
Three years later, @YashichiDSF resurfaced the tweet by replying to it, simply writing “oops.” About a year later, in July 2017, @IgnotaSonus replied with a conversation using the phrase in meme form.
The response was, “Because you off in the cold food so it gets hot, then you take it out to get it cooled off again, like an offin or oven.”
After the tweet, the phrase started becoming more popular, with an explainer appearing on a Brainly page in September 2017. It started emerging on social media shortly thereafter and spread across Reddit and Tumblr.
Garfield oven copypasta: “Why do they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food”
In August 2019, Tumblr user @ewaneneollav shared a revised panel of a Garfield comic that shows Jon Arbuckle bent over and inserting a tray into his oven while talking to Garfield. The speech bubble has Arbuckle saying, “Why Do They Call It Oven When You Of In The Cold Food Of Out Hot Eat The Food.”
The original panel, from July 13, 1986, shows Arbuckle putting a lasagna in the oven as Garfield watches excitedly. He actually says, “And now we’ll bake it for one hour at 375°.”
This variation of the meme took off, with many people believing the modified panel was the real deal.
On June 15, 2021, the official Garfield tweeted the copypasta in acknowledgment of the trend.
ChatGPT answers, “Why do they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food?”
Redditor u/JakeTLT took the copypasta inquiry to ChatGPT in pursuit of answers to the jumbled question and landed on two different responses.
The first reads:
“This statement is a play on words, and the confusion comes from a misunderstanding of the word “oven.” An oven is a device that uses heat to cook or bake food, so it’s not related to the act of taking food out of the oven and eating it. The word ‘oven’ comes from the Latin word ‘furnus,’ which means ‘furnace’ or ‘hearth.’ The word ‘of’ does not have any connection to the word ‘oven.’”
The second, which asks the question with quotation marks, reads:
“The statement you provided is a well-known internet meme that uses wordplay to create a humorous observation. It is important to note that the sentence does not have a clear meaning and is not intended to be taken literally.
The reason for the confusion in the sentence is due to the multiple meanings of the word ‘oven.’ The word ‘oven’ is a noun that refers to a cooking appliance that uses heat to cook food. However, the sentence plays with the sound of the word ‘oven’ to suggest that it could be read as ‘of in’ and ‘cold food’ could be read as ‘out hot eat the food.’”
Meme examples
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