Yao Ming Face

Where it came from
A crude MS-Paint line drawing of NBA star Yao Ming laughing dismissively, traced from his face at a May 2009 post-game press conference. It got turned into a rage-comic reaction face on Reddit and 4chan around 2010.
A few sloppy black lines on white: squinted eyes, a wide-open laughing mouth, head tilted back. That's Yao Ming Face. It's the original "bitch please" — you drop it in when someone says something so wrong, so dumb, or so beneath you that the only response is to laugh them off completely. No words needed. The face is the entire brush-off.
It came up in the golden age of rage comics, back when every Reddit thread and 4chan post was built out of MS Paint reaction faces with Impact captions. Yao was the designated "are you serious right now" face, sitting in the same toolbox as Forever Alone, Trollface, and Me Gusta. You'd see it as the last panel of a comic, the punchline where the narrator just dismisses the whole premise.
It's dead. The rage comic format collapsed around 2013 and took the entire cast down with it, Yao included. Nobody draws these anymore — they got replaced by reaction screenshots and actual photos of people's faces. If you post Yao Ming Face today it reads less like a joke and more like you found a time capsule from 2011.
Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends


