Gru's Plan
Where it came from
Four screenshots from the 2010 animated film Despicable Me, where the villain Gru presents his evil plan on a whiteboard. Became a meme template around 2017.
Gru stands at a whiteboard presenting a four-step plan. He walks through steps 1, 2, and 3 confidently. Then in the fourth panel he reads step 4, realizes what it says, and freezes. The joke is always that step 4 is the logical consequence of step 3 and it's catastrophic — but Gru didn't see it coming. You set up a plan that sounds good, reveal the inevitable disaster at the end, and Gru's face in that last panel does all the comedy.
The fourth-panel double-take is the whole format. Gru reads it, looks at the camera, reads it again. You don't even need the first three panels to be that funny — all the weight is on "and then everything exploded".
Still going strong. The structure is tight enough that it hasn't gotten stale, and the fourth-panel punchline is a format that people instinctively understand.
Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends
