When I'm in a Competition and My Opponent Is

Origin

This is a phrasal template rather than a fixed image — a sentence with two blanks: “When I’m in a [X] competition and my opponent is [Y].” The joke is always the same shape: the speaker enters a contest at some undesirable skill and finds themselves up against an opponent who is unbeatable at it.

The earliest documented versions predate June 2020 and paired the caption with a Donkey Kong reaction GIF. An Instagram repost on June 1, 2020 took over 8,600 likes and 61,000 views within a year, and an iFunny version on March 23, 2021 accumulated over 11,500 smiles in seven months.

The format’s modern, dominant form dates to July 7, 2021, when a Twitter user swapped the Donkey Kong image for the “Tonight?” Squidward reaction image from SpongeBob SquarePants. That pairing stuck. A July 10, 2021 remake posted to Reddit took over 11,300 upvotes in five months, and the Squidward version became the template most people recognize.

What it means / how it’s used

The structure is a double insult that lands on both parties. The speaker admits to competing in something shameful; the named opponent is declared even worse at being decent. It is a way of mocking a group by conceding you share their flaw and still cannot match them.

Two things make it work:

• The specificity of the competition — the funnier and more precise the invented contest, the better.
• The reaction image, which supplies weary resignation. Squidward’s flat, unimpressed expression frames the speaker as defeated rather than angry.

The format is also frequently reversed into self-deprecation, with the poster naming themselves as the unbeatable opponent.

How it spread

The template’s history is a good illustration of how a caption can migrate between images until it finds the right one. In its Donkey Kong phase it circulated steadily on Instagram and iFunny for over a year without breaking out. The moment it attached to Squidward — a face already established as internet shorthand for resigned disappointment — it took off within days.

Through the second half of 2021 the format spread across Twitter, Reddit, and iFunny, with communities producing their own in-group versions. A widely shared July 24, 2021 Twitter variation built around an eating contest took 860+ retweets and 5,400+ likes, showing the format worked just as well for absurdist jokes as for pointed ones.

Notable examples & variations

• Fandom versions naming a rival community as the unbeatable opponent.
• Absurdist versions where the competition is physical or trivial rather than social.
• Self-owning versions where the poster names themselves.
• Edits keeping the phrasal template but swapping in an entirely different reaction image.
• Text-only uses in replies, with the structure alone carrying the joke.

Legacy / cultural impact

The format sits in a long line of phrasal templates — snowclones whose power is in the sentence rather than the picture. What distinguishes this one is how visibly it searched for the right visual partner, spending a year attached to the wrong image before finding one that matched its tone.

It remains in circulation as a flexible roast structure, and it is a useful example of how much of a meme’s success depends on the reaction face bolted to it. The words did not change between 2020 and 2021. The image did, and that was enough.