He hasn’t had any new adventures since the 1970s, and yet Tintin is well anchored in international pop culture, be it with fanarts but also and above all thanks to a meme well known to Internet users.
Because every Wednesday for years, it’s been the same refrain on social media: the reposting of an image showing Captain Haddock staring into space, desperately launching “What a week, huh?” Phrase to which Tintin responds: “Captain, it’s Wednesday.”
Thousands of retweets every week
This meme, whose speech bubbles are usually in English but can also be translated into French, had its heyday thanks to automated accounts on Twitter. Among the largest, the @whataweekhuh account, followed by nearly 400,000 people, has been publishing the famous meme on the social network weekly since December 2019.
And although his tweets are tirelessly identical (the same every week), success is there every time: around 8,000 retweets and 25,000 likes on each post.
But what incident could have put Captain Haddock in this cult-like state? To find out, you have to go back to 1941 and to the ninth volume of the adventures of Tintin, the crab with the golden claws. On the fifteenth page of the comic strip, we find the famous bubble showing Tintin, Captain Haddock, and Milou the dog, except it’s not about Wednesday or fatigue at all.
Opium and a sitcom
The bubbles tell a completely different story. Tintin is upset about being forced onto the captain’s freighter, a ship full of opium according to the reporter. Captain Haddock was stupefied, not realizing that his holds were full of this narcotic: “Of…opium? Is there op-pium in the holds?…In my holds…for my?” , then the captain stammered. Then comes the last box on the board, the one with the famous meme.
So where does the quote used in the meme come from? Not a creation or a simple made-up phrase, but a reference to a multi-award winning sitcom at the Golden Globes, 30Rock. During a scene in the second episode of season 4, the two actors Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin give the answer like this.
The actress launches “What week, huh?” (“What week, huh?”), to which Baldwin’s character responds: “Lemon (Tina Fey’s character name), it’s Wednesday” (‘It’s Wednesday Lemon’).
And it is a Tumblr account, @incorrecttintin, that decided to put the two references in parallel, with a montage published on June 21, 2017. In the end, this montage brought others. Today, Tintin has become a recurring figure in the world of memes, with dozens of modified speech bubbles, sometimes vulgarly but always humorously.
Various social media accounts, such as @incorrecttintin on Tumblr, @tintinades on Twitter, or @les_memes_de_moulinsart on Instagram, regularly post variations of the many thumbnails of the comic strip’s 23 volumes. An almost inexhaustible source of inspiration that clearly shows the timeless character of the timeless reporter.
Source: BFM TV
