So Anyway, I Started Blasting

Origin

The line comes from Frank Reynolds, played by Danny DeVito, in the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode ‘Gun Fever Too: Still Hot,’ part of the show’s ninth season on FXX, which aired in September 2013. In the cold open, Frank goes on a local TV news segment to defend gun ownership and tells a rambling story about confronting two would-be robbers — brandishing pistols on live television and capping the anecdote with the deadpan admission, ‘so anyway, I started blasting,’ having fired wildly in the men’s general direction. The bit is classic Frank: reckless, unhinged, and delivered with total confidence. The episode is a sequel to the season 5 favorite ‘Gun Fever’ (2009), and the gag fits the series’ long-running portrait of Frank as a gleefully amoral schemer; DeVito had joined It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — created by and co-starring Rob McElhenney — back in the second season in 2006, on a show that would become the longest-running live-action American sitcom.

What it means / how it’s used

As a meme, the phrase is a punchline for a wildly disproportionate, chaotic overreaction to a minor problem. The gun in the original clip is incidental to how the meme actually gets used, where ‘blasting’ is almost always figurative — a stand-in for any explosive, over-the-top reaction. The formula is to narrate a calm, reasonable-sounding setup and then abruptly end with ‘so anyway, I started blasting,’ implying the storyteller answered a small annoyance with cartoonish mayhem. The flatter and more mundane the build-up, the funnier the escalation. It thrives in green-text stories, tweets, and reaction threads about petty disputes, minor inconveniences, spiders, or online arguments.

How it spread

• The scene sat quietly for years after airing in 2013.
• Around 2016 the clip was uploaded on its own to a Frank Reynolds fan YouTube account, where it eventually gathered several million views.
• Late September 2019: captioned stills and the ‘so anyway, I started blasting’ line spread rapidly across Reddit and Facebook, finally turning the six-year-old moment into a mainstream reaction format.
• The image of DeVito pointing two (often censored) handguns in a red shirt became the standard still.

Notable examples & variations

• Green-text and tweet stories that build a boring scenario before the sudden ‘blasting’ payoff.
• Edits pairing the caption with other Frank or DeVito reaction stills.
• Overreaction jokes about spiders, group chats, traffic, or trivial arguments.
• It’s Always Sunny itself later leaned into the meme, revisiting Frank’s gun antics in newer seasons.

Legacy

A throwaway sight gag from 2013 became one of the internet’s favorite ways to describe losing all sense of proportion. ‘So anyway, I started blasting’ is now shorthand for an absurd, reckless response, and it helped cement Frank Reynolds — and Danny DeVito — as an endlessly meme-able figure.