This Is Fine

2013comicclassic

Also known as: TIF · THIS IS FINE · This Is Fine Meme · This Is Fine

This Is Fine is a 2013 reaction image from KC Green's webcomic showing an anthropomorphic dog calmly sipping coffee in a burning room saying 'This is fine' to express denial.

"This Is Fine" is a two-panel reaction image from KC Green's 2013 webcomic "On Fire," showing an anthropomorphic dog calmly sipping coffee in a burning room while saying "This is fine." Born from Green's personal struggles with depression and antidepressants, the comic became one of the most widely shared memes of the 2010s, used as shorthand for denial or forced calm in the face of obvious disaster1. The Atlantic called it "a work of near-endless interpretability," and its relevance kept growing through political crises, pandemics, and everyday stress for over a decade13.

denial memesgunshow memesfire memestwo panel memescongress meme references

TL;DR

A cartoon dog sitting in a room engulfed in flames, calmly stating 'This is fine,' representing denial or forced calm in the face of disaster.

Overview

The meme is built from the first two panels of a six-panel webcomic. In the first panel, a yellow cartoon dog wearing a small bowler hat sits at a kitchen table holding a coffee mug while flames climb the walls around him. In the second panel, the view zooms in slightly as the dog smiles and says, "This is fine"4. The full comic goes darker from there: the dog keeps reassuring himself ("I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently"), takes a drink, and slowly melts from the heat until his eyes fall out of their sockets7. But the meme version stops at those first two panels, keeping the tone in a sweet spot between denial and dark comedy.

The dog's official name is Question Hound, a recurring character in Green's Gunshow webcomic series2. Green's drawings have also spawned other well-known memes including "Dick Butt" and "Staredad"4.

KC Green published the comic on January 9, 2013, as Gunshow comic #648, titled "On Fire" with the alt text "The Pills Are Working"4. Green was 25 at the time, living alone in Massachusetts, far from his family in Oklahoma1. He had recently started taking antidepressants and was scared the medication would change who he was as an artist1.

"I was still struggling with myself, with getting my anti-depressants and stuff right," Green told The Verge in 2016. "You know, every now and then you have these off days where shit is worse, but you're trying to ignore it"7. The comic wasn't planned as anything special. Green had a self-imposed schedule for Gunshow updates and needed to get a strip out. "It kind of feels like you just have to ignore all the insanity around you like a burning house," he told NPR. "And the comic just ended up writing itself after that"2.

Origin & Background

Platform
K Chronicles comic strip
Creator
KC Green
Date
2010 (original comic), 2016 (meme format)
Year
2013

KC Green published the comic on January 9, 2013, as Gunshow comic #648, titled "On Fire" with the alt text "The Pills Are Working". Green was 25 at the time, living alone in Massachusetts, far from his family in Oklahoma. He had recently started taking antidepressants and was scared the medication would change who he was as an artist.

"I was still struggling with myself, with getting my anti-depressants and stuff right," Green told The Verge in 2016. "You know, every now and then you have these off days where shit is worse, but you're trying to ignore it". The comic wasn't planned as anything special. Green had a self-imposed schedule for Gunshow updates and needed to get a strip out. "It kind of feels like you just have to ignore all the insanity around you like a burning house," he told NPR. "And the comic just ended up writing itself after that".

How It Spread

The comic's first two panels showed up on 4chan's /vr/ (retro games) board on April 26, 2013. The bigger push came on January 10, 2014, when Reddit user theonefoster posted those same two panels to /r/funny with the title "Accurate representation of me dealing with university stress". Green first noticed the meme spreading on Instagram, where college students shared it as finals approached. "When finals week starts... this is fine. When everyone's yelling at you and you're supposed to keep a smile on at your work... this is fine," Green recalled. A September 2014 post by user SPIDER_MAN on Reddit's /r/Funny pulled over 1,400 upvotes and 4,300 more on Imgur.

From there, usage snowballed across Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook through 2015 and into 2016. Every new crisis gave the meme fresh oxygen. As The Verge noted in May 2016, the phrase "This is fine" had effectively changed meaning on social media: it no longer meant things were actually fine.

Platforms

TwitterRedditFacebookTumblrInstagramnews publications

Timeline

2013-01-09

KC Green published the "This Is Fine" comic as Gunshow comic #648, titled "On Fire" with the alt text "The Pills Are Working."

2018-08-01

Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) referenced the "This Is Fine" meme during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian election interference, telling the room: "That's not fine."

2023-01-01

Both NPR and The Atlantic published retrospectives on the "This Is Fine" meme, confirming it was "somehow more relevant than ever" and making it one of the longest-lived internet memes in history.

View on Google Trends

Video

The comic artist behind the internet's favorite denial meme explains how it came to be.

How to Use This Meme

The meme works in two registers: pointing out someone else's obvious denial of a crisis, or self-deprecating acknowledgment of your own inability to deal with a problem.

1

For caption format: write a setup describing a bad situation ('Me watching my code deploy to production with zero tests') and attach the 'This is Fine' image as the punchline

2

For reply format: when someone posts distressing news, reply with just the image or the words 'This is fine'

3

For text-only: use the phrase 'This is fine' on its own — it now carries the full meme meaning even without the image

4

For edit format: replace the dog with other characters or change the fire to represent specific disasters, though the unedited version is the most commonly shared

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

Adult Swim paid Green to animate the full comic as a channel bumper, with Dana Snyder providing the voice. They produced 10 total animated bumpers based on different Gunshow comics. The "This Is Fine" animation aired on the network in early 2016.

The meme became a go-to reference during every major crisis of the 2010s and 2020s. SB Nation used it to caption devastating sports moments, calling it "the perfect meme for sports" because of how often athletes must accept forces beyond their control. Dictionary.com added an entry for "This is fine" explaining its ironic usage.

In January 2023, both NPR and The Atlantic published retrospectives for the meme's 10th anniversary. The Atlantic described it as "the meme that defined a decade" and traced how its meaning had shifted from personal self-deprecation to a broader commentary on political inaction and institutional failure.

Green built a real business around the meme through his TopatoCo store, selling prints, shirts, mugs, and the crowd-funded Question Hound plush toy. "I basically try to monopolize this one image, because, hey, if people want it, I could use it," he told The Verge. A "This Is Fine" Funko Pop figure also went into production.

Full History

The meme's shift from personal coping joke to political commentary happened in the summer of 2016. On July 25, the Republican National Committee tweeted the two panels from its official @GOP Twitter account during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, adding a shrug emoticon and the hashtags #DemsInPhilly and #EnoughClinton. Green was not pleased. He fired back on Twitter, saying he "personally would like @GOP to delete their stupid post" and later adding "the gop account can eat me". His merchandise partner TopatoCo also replied: "please know that the artist is fervently against all that you support".

What made the moment richer was that political cartoon site The Nib had already beaten the GOP to the joke. They'd commissioned Green to draw a new version replacing the dog with the Republican elephant, and it was already hanging in a Philadelphia art gallery when the GOP tweet went out. "When we saw the GOP's tweet going around in a pathetic attempt to be hip with memes, we saw the opportunity for a good own," The Nib's founder Matt Bors told the Observer. The Nib's response tweet got 50 percent more retweets than the original GOP post.

On August 3, 2016, Green published a full sequel on The Nib titled "This Is Not Fine." In this version, the dog snaps out of his calm, screams "THIS IS NOT FINE!!", grabs a fire extinguisher, and puts out the flames. "ALL of 2016 inspired this," Green told The Verge. "Every bit of insane news piece and the political climate made this follow up happen".

After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, indie developer Nick Kaman released a free web-based 8-bit game inspired by the comic on November 13, 2016. Players controlled the dog and used a fire extinguisher that sprayed hearts to put out flames. It got over 10,000 plays within its first month. "I really just wanted to put something out there," Kaman said. "The entire idea came at once on election night". Green himself was surprised by the game: "It hit me with nice feelings. Especially when all the other little friends came in to chill with you".

The meme crossed into literal political speech on August 1, 2018, when North Carolina Senator Richard Burr referenced it during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian election interference. "Some feel that we as a society are sitting in a burning room, calmly drinking a cup of coffee, telling ourselves 'this is fine,'" Burr said. "That's not fine". The irony was thick: a senator invoked a meme during a hearing about how foreign governments had used memes to manipulate American politics.

By the time the meme turned 10 in January 2023, Green had made peace with his creation's oversized legacy. He'd collaborated with Adult Swim on animated bumpers featuring the comic, with Dana Snyder (voice of Master Shake) voicing the dog. A Kickstarter for a Question Hound plush toy kept selling out, and there was even a "This Is Fine" Funko Pop. Green compared his comic to Robert Crumb's "Keep On Truckin'" cartoons from the 1960s and 70s, noting a similar spirit of perseverance in absurd times.

But Green always wanted people to see his other work too. He completed a comic adaptation of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio that he was proud of. And in his ongoing webcomic Funny Online Animals, where Question Hound still appeared, he hinted at retiring the character. "It's going to have kind of an eerie, noir turn," he told NPR in 2023. "I think after that, I might lay him to rest for a while".

"How I'll be remembered is, again, out of my hands," Green told CBC Radio. "So if it happens to be this or any of the other number of memes that have been made out of my work, then that's just what it is, I guess".

Fun Facts

The dog's full name is Question Hound, and he still appears in Green's ongoing webcomic Funny Online Animals.

Green compared the meme to the "Hang in there" kitten poster, noting both tap into a basic human impulse to keep going when everything is falling apart.

The original comic's alt text reads "The Pills Are Working," a direct reference to Green's antidepressant journey.

Green split his Adult Swim animation pay with Shmorky, the animator who brought the bumpers to life.

When the GOP tweeted the meme in 2016, The Nib's counter-tweet with Green's elephant version got 50% more retweets than the original.

Derivatives & Variations

This Is Not Fine

The dog panicking instead of staying calm — the honest version

(2016)

Political This Is Fine

Politicians or political figures replacing the dog

(2016)

This Is Fine (COVID)

2020 pandemic-era adaptations

(2020)

Frequently Asked Questions

This Is Fine

2013comicclassic

Also known as: TIF · THIS IS FINE · This Is Fine Meme · This Is Fine

This Is Fine is a 2013 reaction image from KC Green's webcomic showing an anthropomorphic dog calmly sipping coffee in a burning room saying 'This is fine' to express denial.

"This Is Fine" is a two-panel reaction image from KC Green's 2013 webcomic "On Fire," showing an anthropomorphic dog calmly sipping coffee in a burning room while saying "This is fine." Born from Green's personal struggles with depression and antidepressants, the comic became one of the most widely shared memes of the 2010s, used as shorthand for denial or forced calm in the face of obvious disaster. The Atlantic called it "a work of near-endless interpretability," and its relevance kept growing through political crises, pandemics, and everyday stress for over a decade.

denial memes gunshow memes fire memes two panel memes congress meme references

TL;DR

A cartoon dog sitting in a room engulfed in flames, calmly stating 'This is fine,' representing denial or forced calm in the face of disaster.

Overview

The meme is built from the first two panels of a six-panel webcomic. In the first panel, a yellow cartoon dog wearing a small bowler hat sits at a kitchen table holding a coffee mug while flames climb the walls around him. In the second panel, the view zooms in slightly as the dog smiles and says, "This is fine". The full comic goes darker from there: the dog keeps reassuring himself ("I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently"), takes a drink, and slowly melts from the heat until his eyes fall out of their sockets. But the meme version stops at those first two panels, keeping the tone in a sweet spot between denial and dark comedy.

The dog's official name is Question Hound, a recurring character in Green's Gunshow webcomic series. Green's drawings have also spawned other well-known memes including "Dick Butt" and "Staredad".

KC Green published the comic on January 9, 2013, as Gunshow comic #648, titled "On Fire" with the alt text "The Pills Are Working". Green was 25 at the time, living alone in Massachusetts, far from his family in Oklahoma. He had recently started taking antidepressants and was scared the medication would change who he was as an artist.

"I was still struggling with myself, with getting my anti-depressants and stuff right," Green told The Verge in 2016. "You know, every now and then you have these off days where shit is worse, but you're trying to ignore it". The comic wasn't planned as anything special. Green had a self-imposed schedule for Gunshow updates and needed to get a strip out. "It kind of feels like you just have to ignore all the insanity around you like a burning house," he told NPR. "And the comic just ended up writing itself after that".

Origin & Background

Platform
K Chronicles comic strip
Creator
KC Green
Date
2010 (original comic), 2016 (meme format)
Year
2013

KC Green published the comic on January 9, 2013, as Gunshow comic #648, titled "On Fire" with the alt text "The Pills Are Working". Green was 25 at the time, living alone in Massachusetts, far from his family in Oklahoma. He had recently started taking antidepressants and was scared the medication would change who he was as an artist.

"I was still struggling with myself, with getting my anti-depressants and stuff right," Green told The Verge in 2016. "You know, every now and then you have these off days where shit is worse, but you're trying to ignore it". The comic wasn't planned as anything special. Green had a self-imposed schedule for Gunshow updates and needed to get a strip out. "It kind of feels like you just have to ignore all the insanity around you like a burning house," he told NPR. "And the comic just ended up writing itself after that".

How It Spread

The comic's first two panels showed up on 4chan's /vr/ (retro games) board on April 26, 2013. The bigger push came on January 10, 2014, when Reddit user theonefoster posted those same two panels to /r/funny with the title "Accurate representation of me dealing with university stress". Green first noticed the meme spreading on Instagram, where college students shared it as finals approached. "When finals week starts... this is fine. When everyone's yelling at you and you're supposed to keep a smile on at your work... this is fine," Green recalled. A September 2014 post by user SPIDER_MAN on Reddit's /r/Funny pulled over 1,400 upvotes and 4,300 more on Imgur.

From there, usage snowballed across Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook through 2015 and into 2016. Every new crisis gave the meme fresh oxygen. As The Verge noted in May 2016, the phrase "This is fine" had effectively changed meaning on social media: it no longer meant things were actually fine.

Platforms

TwitterRedditFacebookTumblrInstagramnews publications

Timeline

2013-01-09

KC Green published the "This Is Fine" comic as Gunshow comic #648, titled "On Fire" with the alt text "The Pills Are Working."

2018-08-01

Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) referenced the "This Is Fine" meme during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian election interference, telling the room: "That's not fine."

2023-01-01

Both NPR and The Atlantic published retrospectives on the "This Is Fine" meme, confirming it was "somehow more relevant than ever" and making it one of the longest-lived internet memes in history.

View on Google Trends

Video

The comic artist behind the internet's favorite denial meme explains how it came to be.

How to Use This Meme

The meme works in two registers: pointing out someone else's obvious denial of a crisis, or self-deprecating acknowledgment of your own inability to deal with a problem.

1

For caption format: write a setup describing a bad situation ('Me watching my code deploy to production with zero tests') and attach the 'This is Fine' image as the punchline

2

For reply format: when someone posts distressing news, reply with just the image or the words 'This is fine'

3

For text-only: use the phrase 'This is fine' on its own — it now carries the full meme meaning even without the image

4

For edit format: replace the dog with other characters or change the fire to represent specific disasters, though the unedited version is the most commonly shared

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

Adult Swim paid Green to animate the full comic as a channel bumper, with Dana Snyder providing the voice. They produced 10 total animated bumpers based on different Gunshow comics. The "This Is Fine" animation aired on the network in early 2016.

The meme became a go-to reference during every major crisis of the 2010s and 2020s. SB Nation used it to caption devastating sports moments, calling it "the perfect meme for sports" because of how often athletes must accept forces beyond their control. Dictionary.com added an entry for "This is fine" explaining its ironic usage.

In January 2023, both NPR and The Atlantic published retrospectives for the meme's 10th anniversary. The Atlantic described it as "the meme that defined a decade" and traced how its meaning had shifted from personal self-deprecation to a broader commentary on political inaction and institutional failure.

Green built a real business around the meme through his TopatoCo store, selling prints, shirts, mugs, and the crowd-funded Question Hound plush toy. "I basically try to monopolize this one image, because, hey, if people want it, I could use it," he told The Verge. A "This Is Fine" Funko Pop figure also went into production.

Full History

The meme's shift from personal coping joke to political commentary happened in the summer of 2016. On July 25, the Republican National Committee tweeted the two panels from its official @GOP Twitter account during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, adding a shrug emoticon and the hashtags #DemsInPhilly and #EnoughClinton. Green was not pleased. He fired back on Twitter, saying he "personally would like @GOP to delete their stupid post" and later adding "the gop account can eat me". His merchandise partner TopatoCo also replied: "please know that the artist is fervently against all that you support".

What made the moment richer was that political cartoon site The Nib had already beaten the GOP to the joke. They'd commissioned Green to draw a new version replacing the dog with the Republican elephant, and it was already hanging in a Philadelphia art gallery when the GOP tweet went out. "When we saw the GOP's tweet going around in a pathetic attempt to be hip with memes, we saw the opportunity for a good own," The Nib's founder Matt Bors told the Observer. The Nib's response tweet got 50 percent more retweets than the original GOP post.

On August 3, 2016, Green published a full sequel on The Nib titled "This Is Not Fine." In this version, the dog snaps out of his calm, screams "THIS IS NOT FINE!!", grabs a fire extinguisher, and puts out the flames. "ALL of 2016 inspired this," Green told The Verge. "Every bit of insane news piece and the political climate made this follow up happen".

After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, indie developer Nick Kaman released a free web-based 8-bit game inspired by the comic on November 13, 2016. Players controlled the dog and used a fire extinguisher that sprayed hearts to put out flames. It got over 10,000 plays within its first month. "I really just wanted to put something out there," Kaman said. "The entire idea came at once on election night". Green himself was surprised by the game: "It hit me with nice feelings. Especially when all the other little friends came in to chill with you".

The meme crossed into literal political speech on August 1, 2018, when North Carolina Senator Richard Burr referenced it during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian election interference. "Some feel that we as a society are sitting in a burning room, calmly drinking a cup of coffee, telling ourselves 'this is fine,'" Burr said. "That's not fine". The irony was thick: a senator invoked a meme during a hearing about how foreign governments had used memes to manipulate American politics.

By the time the meme turned 10 in January 2023, Green had made peace with his creation's oversized legacy. He'd collaborated with Adult Swim on animated bumpers featuring the comic, with Dana Snyder (voice of Master Shake) voicing the dog. A Kickstarter for a Question Hound plush toy kept selling out, and there was even a "This Is Fine" Funko Pop. Green compared his comic to Robert Crumb's "Keep On Truckin'" cartoons from the 1960s and 70s, noting a similar spirit of perseverance in absurd times.

But Green always wanted people to see his other work too. He completed a comic adaptation of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio that he was proud of. And in his ongoing webcomic Funny Online Animals, where Question Hound still appeared, he hinted at retiring the character. "It's going to have kind of an eerie, noir turn," he told NPR in 2023. "I think after that, I might lay him to rest for a while".

"How I'll be remembered is, again, out of my hands," Green told CBC Radio. "So if it happens to be this or any of the other number of memes that have been made out of my work, then that's just what it is, I guess".

Fun Facts

The dog's full name is Question Hound, and he still appears in Green's ongoing webcomic Funny Online Animals.

Green compared the meme to the "Hang in there" kitten poster, noting both tap into a basic human impulse to keep going when everything is falling apart.

The original comic's alt text reads "The Pills Are Working," a direct reference to Green's antidepressant journey.

Green split his Adult Swim animation pay with Shmorky, the animator who brought the bumpers to life.

When the GOP tweeted the meme in 2016, The Nib's counter-tweet with Green's elephant version got 50% more retweets than the original.

Derivatives & Variations

This Is Not Fine

The dog panicking instead of staying calm — the honest version

(2016)

Political This Is Fine

Politicians or political figures replacing the dog

(2016)

This Is Fine (COVID)

2020 pandemic-era adaptations

(2020)

Frequently Asked Questions