True Story

The True Story meme comes from the black and white lined drawing of a rage comic response face. It is basically the character known as Barney Stinson, the sitcom character played by Neil Harris. The character smiles arrogantly with a wine glass in his hand. And, this meme contains the compatible statement that says: True Story. This meme has been the final panel of rage comics that indicated it being based upon a story, despite at times the storey being made-up. Additionally, the Barney Stinson character is also considered to have popularized the catchword "challenge accepted."

Before this image was used on the internet, the informal phrase "true story" was used extensively as an positive statement to support a claim or accusation. The first time this phrase found its place in the Urban Dictionary in June 2004. Just like other reaction based faces such as Fuck that Guy, Not Bad Obama and Aww Yea Guy, this meme is vectorizing the face of Neil Harris in a rough way. Harris is the American actor who played the character of Barney Stinson in CBS’s comedy series, How I Met Your Mother.

Barney Stinson regularly uses the phrase True Story in the comedy series as a closing for stories or theories that were mostly gibberish or fake. And, the image used in the internet meme comes from the scene taken from the 4th Season’s First Episode, "Do I Know You." The instance of True Story meme first appeared on Reddit in February, 2011. "acodemaster" was the user who posted a thread on Reddit that had the screenshot from the comedy series. And, most of the users after seeing the thread replied with their own variations of the screenshot, with one of them being declared the winner.

The True Story image soon found huge popularity on the f7u12 subreddit. Soon many prominent examples from the "rage comics started getting featured throughout blogs such as FunnyJunk, 9gag and Memebase. The huge popularity of this phrase led to the creation of macro generator page for the image on DIYLOL. And, soon Zazzle started producing merchandise based upon the meme for gifting options. The "True Story" image is mainly used for the last panel of the rage comics so as to re-iterate the statement found in the previous panel. If you happen to the f7u12 subreddit, you would find that, this type of posts usually given the title having the label True Story.