“I cannot believe that it’s circulated around the internet for this long, and I think we’ll be memorialized forever.”

If you’ve scrolled the web within the final decade, you could have seen a well-liked response meme from Jimmy Tatro’s faculty sketches. Avery Wagner (@itsaverywagner), who was featured within the picture, not too long ago shared the complete story of the way it got here to be on TikTok.

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Wagner began by reminding viewers, “If you’ve ever seen this meme on the internet, this is me. So I’m gonna give you the full backstory.” She shared a screenshot that includes the Awkward Party response meme.

Although the second got here from a brief YouTube sketch by Jimmy Tatro and Christian Pierce, the picture has far outlived its authentic context. She even joked, “I can’t even get over that it’s 2025 and that meme still circulates the internet. I joke all the time like, when is that meme ever gonna die?”

From a school occasion to YouTube content material

Back in 2012, Wagner was a sophomore on the University of Arizona. At the time, Jimmy Tatro and Christian Pierce have been classmates who often created YouTube sketches.

She recalled, “Christian and Jimmy used to write all of their YouTube sketches together. They would write, produce, edit, direct all the things while we were in college. Which was so insane, knowing how the sausage was made, that they were going to class, and then they were also like literally doing like a full production company while we were all in school. It was like absolutely mind-blowing to me.”

@itsaverywagner Replying to @nev marie #greenscreen ♬ 30 Minutes of Silence – Silenzio

She was mates with Pierce, who casually invited her to a celebration that doubled as a filming session. “He texted me one afternoon and was like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna shoot a couple things at our house before we have a party. Do you wanna come over later for a party? But if you come, you have to be in this sketch.’ And I was like, ‘Sure, absolutely, no problem.’”

According to her, the group took the shoot severely. Despite being a school home occasion, the manufacturing had a number of cameras and sound tools. She admitted that she had already been ingesting beforehand, so filming felt much more surreal.

How the sketch created the meme

The video, titled “Don’t Stop the Music,” continues to be accessible on YouTube. The setup positioned Tatro and Pierce at a celebration when Tatro delivered a stunning line. Right at that second, somebody yanked the aux wire, leaving the punchline hanging in silence.

She defined, “That reaction moment is when the aux cord gets pulled out of the plug, our group looks at him, ‘What the hell?’” The meme itself got here from the thumbnail of that very video, capturing her response within the break up second of silence.

Once filming wrapped, the scene turned again into an actual occasion. At the time, nobody concerned anticipated the sketch to survive their faculty years. Yet the meme has resurfaced on-line repeatedly for greater than a decade.

“So that is the origin story. I cannot believe that that meme has become what it is,” she mentioned, including, “I cannot believe that it’s circulated around the internet for this long, and I think we’ll be memorialized forever. I don’t really know. So yeah, that’s the story. There it is, everybody.”

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