Two Guys on a Bus

Origin

The illustration is by the Brazilian cartoonist Genildo Ronchi, published to his own site on August 24, 2013 under the title “Às vezes só depende de nós” — sometimes it just depends on us.

It shows a bus in cross-section with two passengers on opposite sides. The man on the left looks out at a blank rock wall. The man on the right looks out at an expansive, beautiful landscape. They are on the same bus, travelling the same route, at the same moment.

The original carried an explicit message: “Escolha o lado feliz da vida” — choose the happy side of life. It was, straightforwardly, an inspirational cartoon about perspective.

What it means / how it’s used

The internet kept the composition and inverted the sincerity.

As a meme, the two windows are labelled — two people in an identical situation experiencing it completely differently. The versions split into two modes:

• Faithful to the original: outlook determines experience, played straight.
• Subverted: the difference is not attitude at all but circumstance, privilege, or information — one man simply has a better seat, and telling him to cheer up misses the point.

That second reading became the dominant one, and it is a fairly pointed rebuttal of the cartoon’s own message. A great many popular versions use it to argue that “just be positive” ignores material differences between people’s situations.

How it spread

The cartoon circulated for six years as a sincere inspirational image before anyone repurposed it.

The first documented meme use is from August 14, 2019, on Twitter, with Portuguese captions comparing smokers and non-smokers — it took roughly 18,000 likes.

It broke into English-language circulation much later. A version on Reddit on November 15, 2021 took roughly 10,000 upvotes in a week, and on November 18, 2021 a Twitter version took approximately 259,600 likes over four days, which is what made it a mainstream template.

The Portuguese-first, English-later pattern recurs throughout this period, and this case is a clean example — the image was six years old and already well known in Brazil before most English-speaking users saw it.

Notable examples & variations

• Attitude-versus-attitude versions, faithful to the original.
• Circumstance-versus-circumstance versions, subverting it.
• Three- and four-window edits adding more passengers.
• Versions where both views are identical.
• Reposts of Ronchi’s original with its inspirational caption intact.

Legacy / cultural impact

Two Guys on a Bus is a good illustration of a meme arguing with its own source. Ronchi drew a cartoon telling people to choose happiness; the format built on it is used, more often than not, to point out that the choice is not always available.

That the artist is named, findable, and still working also makes it one of the better-attributed templates in circulation — though, as usual, most people using it have no idea it began as a sincere piece of Brazilian inspirational art.