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Will Smith has been a fixture of meme culture almost as long as he’s been one of the biggest names in Hollywood. Whether you think of him as the lovable goofball version of himself or a short-tempered Bad Boy, there’s no denying that he’s had more than one moment of meme fame.
So without further ado, let’s get jiggy with them.
5) Woll Smoth
We’ll begin with the oldest and most immediate of them all: Woll Smoth.
In November of 2007, a 4chan user posted an image of the actor/rapper, shrinking his eyes and mouth, calling him Woll Smoth. In the first day, it earned over 300 responses, which may not seem like a lot, but kind of is for a 4chan board almost 2 decades ago.
It may have been a riff on Nod Flenders, first posted in the same place earlier that year. But in any case, it spread very quickly, to Ebaums World, and obviously Reddit, with imitations featuring other celebrities abound.
4) Y'all Got Any Fun?
Next up, we have Y’all got any Fun? I, Robot came out in 2004, but “Can a Robot Write a Symphony?” first appeared on Tumblr in mid-2015 as a series of gifs (with captions from the movie) followed by a text version of a z-snap.
It’s a bit of a “sick burn” kind of thing, but often it's just squeezed into some nonsense joke.
In 2024, “Can a Robot Write a Symphony" was recaptioned by a user on X, lamenting the availability of prepared food in their house. It got 2,000 reposts and 26,000 likes in 2 months, and the final version of this one was officially born.
Users use it anytime they want to express disappointment and sadness about a thing.
3) Sad Will Smith
Which brings us to our number 3 pick: Sad Will Smith. For the unfamiliar, Red Table Talk is Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook Watch talk show with her mother and daughter, where they talk about big topics and how to heal from them.
On July 10th, 2020, Will and Jada sat down to talk about their relationship and her, quote, “entanglement” with August Alsina, hip hopper and friend of her son Jaden.
If you think the word choice there is…interesting you’re not alone.
The following day, a remix was posted to YouTube mocking the specific phrasing, and featuring clips from Jada and Will’s chat.
But mostly, and understandably, Will Smith just looked sad throughout the conversation.
Cue memes of Will Smith looking sad.
Notable examples include one of him photoshopped into military fatigues, or another of him as the genie from Aladdin, which he’d played the prior year. Really though, they can be used for just about anything.
2) Will Smith eating spaghetti
In March 2023, a Redditor posted an AI-generated video to /r/stablediffusion, with the prompt, “Will Smith Eating Spaghetti.”
This video has a lot of jank to it, but it is really funny-looking, or alternatively, as many people online feel, a little disturbing. A few days after the initial Reddit post, it made its way to X, in a post that earned 4.9 million views in 4 days.
This was enough to spark a whole trend where people made parody videos tweaking the prompt slightly so it was as weird as possible.
The following year, OpenAI’s Sora—another text-to-video model—was first previewed to the public.
Shortly thereafter, Will Smith uploaded a parody video of himself eating spaghetti, in which he pretended to be an AI version of himself, and which actually fooled a lot of people. Far less disturbing, but still really really weird.
1) Will Smith slapping Chris Rock
And finally, we come to the one you all clicked for—the slap.
A bit of background: Jada Pinkett Smith shaved her head in 2021 after having hair loss from alopecia, which had to have been at least a little traumatic—she talked about it a lot at the time.
At the 2022 Oscars, Chris Rock presented the award for Best Documentary Feature, and in his introduction, made a joke about how she could have starred in JI Jane 2. She rolled her eyes, hard, and her husband walked up onstage and slapped the comedian in the face.
This moment basically immediately went viral. Most of the memes were created by versioning out an exploitable template posted to 4Chan that night, which traced the outlines of a still from the incident.
It's kind of like the Batman slapping Robin meme, and just as versatile.
But with this moment, and in addition to the image macros, came the remixes on TikTok. Will Smith’s shouting at Chris Rock immediately following the violence, was spaced out enough that it made for very easy remixing. They mostly sound like this.
Related, this saga also brought us slapchris.com—a flash game where you drag a hand emoji across the screen to slap an image of Chris Rock’s face. It also features other faces, or you can upload your own. And if you do this fast enough, audio from “Gettin Jiggy with It” plays.
Ultimately Will Smith did apologize on Instagram the following day, then in an entire video the following July, but by all accounts they’ve never really made up.
So, the Fresh Prince himself is a guy whose career has had a lot of varied moments, and the memes about him are always somewhere between love and mockery—you just never know which one is coming.
Or, if you will, these memes are stories all about how Will Smith’s life turned upside down.
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