Bad Luck Brian

Bad Luck Brian is a yearbook photo of Kyle Craven — taken at Archbishop Hoban High School in Akron, Ohio during the 2005-06 school year — that became one of the internet's most enduring advice animal memes after being posted to Reddit on January 23, 2012. The image features a blonde teenager in a plaid sweater vest and braces, wearing an exaggerated awkward grin, paired with captions describing hilariously unfortunate situations. It's the meme that proved the internet's favorite comedy formula: set up hope, deliver catastrophe.

The Photo That Was Too Good to Throw Away

The story starts in 2005 at Archbishop Hoban High School in Akron, Ohio. Kyle Craven, then a teenager with a flair for the dramatic, decided to have some fun with his yearbook photo. He rubbed his face with his sweater to make it red, flashed his braces in the most aggressively goofy smile he could muster, and let the photographer snap away.

The principal was not amused. Looking at the result, they determined Kyle was making the face on purpose (correct) and made him retake the photo. But here's where Bad Luck Brian's origin story gets its first dose of irony: Kyle and his friend Ian Davies had already scanned and saved the original photo before the retake. The principal thought they'd killed the image. Instead, they'd just delayed its destiny by about seven years.

January 23, 2012: A Meme Is Born (Quietly)

Fast forward to January 23, 2012. Ian Davies — who'd kept that scanned photo all those years — uploaded it to Reddit's r/AdviceAnimals subreddit with the caption: "Takes driving test... gets first DUI." The post landed with a thud. Fewer than 5 upvotes. Most memes die at this stage, forgotten in the endless scroll of Reddit's new queue.

But later that same day, someone posted a second macro using the same photo: "Tries to stealthily fart in class / shits." This one didn't thud. It rocketed to the front page of r/AdviceAnimals, accumulating over 3,300 upvotes in less than two months. The format clicked instantly — that face, that sweater vest, those braces — everything about the photo screamed "this person is about to have the worst day of their life."

Going Nuclear: From Reddit to Everywhere

Within a week, Bad Luck Brian had escaped Reddit entirely. On January 29, the digital marketing blog Twenty Something compiled a collection of the best examples. By March 2012, a resurgence hit when the macro "Falls asleep in class / wet dream" pulled 2,900+ upvotes. That same post jumped to 9gag on March 19, where it got 48,000 likes in 24 hours — numbers that were enormous for 2012.

Then came Pinterest, then Buzzfeed, then Funny or Die. By June 2012, the Quickmeme page for Bad Luck Brian had received over 104,047 submissions. Facebook fan pages popped up with tens of thousands of followers. The meme had entered the rare atmosphere where it wasn't just popular — it was infrastructure. People didn't need to explain who Bad Luck Brian was. Everyone already knew.

The AMA That Got Banned (And Then Unbanned)

On April 11, 2012, barely three months after going viral, someone claiming to be Bad Luck Brian tried to do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit. A moderator removed it. The moderator's lengthy comment explaining the removal received over 35,000 downvotes — making it one of the most downvoted comments in Reddit history at the time. In true Bad Luck Brian fashion, the most meta thing that could happen did happen: even trying to talk about his own meme went wrong.

Kyle came back on May 8 to the Advice Animals subreddit specifically, and this time it stuck. The AMA got 24,722 upvotes and 3,763 comments. He revealed his real name, confirmed the photo was a deliberate yearbook gag, and shared that — contrary to the meme — he'd actually had pretty good luck in life. He'd won an Xbox 360 and a PSP within two weeks of each other, and actor Seth Rogen had recognized him in public. Not exactly "bad luck" material.

From Meme to Money: The Business of Being Unlucky

Unlike many meme subjects who fade into obscurity, Kyle Craven leaned into it. Bad Luck Brian appeared on T-shirts, stuffed animals, and novelty items sold at Walmart and Hot Topic. He starred in ad campaigns for Volkswagen. In October 2018, McDonald's ran a full advertising campaign featuring Kyle in character — he appeared in commercials discussing the meme in relation to their "Trick. Treat. Win!" promotion, with the tagline: "With 1-in-4 odds of winning, not even Bad Luck Brian will need to win."

In 2021, he appeared in a Slovak orthodontics campaign (because of course the braces kid would end up in a dental ad). In 2023, he did a commercial for The General insurance alongside Shaquille O'Neal. And in March 2021, riding the NFT wave, he sold a Bad Luck Brian NFT for approximately $36,000.

Including all licensing deals and merchandise, Craven estimated he made around $20,000 within the first three years. Not retire-early money, but not bad for a photo you took as a joke when you were a teenager. He graduated from Kent State University with a degree in construction management and now works as vice president of his family's construction company in Bath Township, Ohio. In 2026, he revealed that Archbishop Hoban's boys locker room had been officially renamed "The Bad Luck Brian Honorary Boys Locker Room" — complete with the rejected photo on the sign.

Why Bad Luck Brian Worked: The Anatomy of Schadenfreude

Advice animal memes all follow the same basic formula: image + top text setup + bottom text punchline. But Bad Luck Brian was special because the photo itself did most of the comedic heavy lifting. Three specific elements made it work:

1. The sweater vest. In the visual language of American high school culture, a plaid sweater vest says "I'm trying really hard to do everything right." It signals earnestness, rule-following, good intentions — the perfect setup for cosmic punishment.

2. The braces. They add vulnerability. This isn't someone who looks tough or cool or even neutral. This is someone who looks like they'd get picked last in dodgeball and then somehow get hit by a ball from the neighboring court.

3. The smile. It's not a confident smile. It's the smile of someone who's trying to make the best of a situation they know isn't going well — which is exactly what the captions describe. The expression matches the concept so perfectly that it feels like Kyle was already in on the joke before it existed.

The format tapped into schadenfreude — pleasure derived from someone else's misfortune — but in its most harmless, relatable form. Everyone has been Bad Luck Brian. Everyone has had the day where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, in the most absurdly specific way possible. The meme gave that universal experience a face.

The "Immediately Killed By Shadow People" Renaissance

Most advice animal memes from 2012 faded into nostalgia. Bad Luck Brian got a second life in 2019 through one of the internet's weirder evolutionary paths. A BLB macro with the caption "Tries astral projection / immediately killed by shadow people" started circulating in ironic meme communities. The bottom text — "immediately killed by shadow people" — became its own standalone exploitable, detached from the original meme entirely.

By 2021, the phrase was being slapped onto completely unrelated images as a surrealist punchline, proving that memes don't just die — sometimes they metamorphose into something their creators never imagined. It's the meme equivalent of a band's B-side becoming bigger than the hit single.