Where does the Where Banana image come from?

A BBC Breakfast segment from January 19, 2017 about the series Spy in the Wild. A Redditor replaced the presenters with cloned orangutans on December 3, 2019 and added the caption.

It is a blunt demand for a promised or missing thing, delivered in deliberately broken grammar that makes the speaker sound simple and sincere.

When did it go viral?

December 21, 2019, when a version posted to r/memes took 33,500+ upvotes and pushed the format into general circulation.

Why is the grammar broken?

Deliberately. Dropping articles and verbs makes the demand read as guileless and funny rather than entitled — a device running from lolcats through doge to modern brainrot phrasing.

Where Banana meaning, origin & examples

Origin

The source footage has nothing to do with memes. On January 19, 2017, BBC Breakfast ran a segment about the nature series Spy in the Wild, which used animatronic robot animals to film wildlife up close. The clip showed the presenters at a desk with one of the show’s lifelike fake creatures.

The meme is a photo edit. On December 3, 2019, a Redditor replaced the BBC presenters with cloned orangutans seated around the desk and added the caption “where banana” above one of them. Posted to r/okbuddyretard, it took over 3,300 upvotes in a year.

The joke is entirely in the composition: a boardroom of identical apes, and one of them wants to know where the banana is.

What it means / how it’s used

“Where banana” is a demand for a promised or missing thing, delivered with deliberate, minimal grammar. The broken phrasing is essential — it makes the demander sound simple, impatient, and completely sincere.

The template generalised quickly. Any missing item can be substituted: where wifi, where file, where update, where refund. The orangutan becomes anyone waiting for something that should already be here.

Common uses:

Asking after a delayed feature, delivery, or announcement.
Community jokes about a long-promised update.
Group-chat demands for something someone said they would send.
Text-only “where [thing]” replies with no image at all.

How it spread

The breakout came on December 21, 2019, when a version posted to r/memes took 33,500+ upvotes over the following year and pushed the format into general circulation.

Through 2020 and 2021 it became a fully general-purpose exploitable, with variations across r/dankmemes and other large subreddits routinely taking tens of thousands of upvotes, plus YouTube adaptations built on the same joke.

Its longevity is unusual for an edit from a shitposting subreddit. Most formats born in ironic communities burn out when they reach the mainstream; this one survived because the underlying request — where is the thing you said I would get — is endlessly reusable and requires no context.

Notable examples & variations

Substituted-noun versions: where wifi, where update, where file.
Multi-orangutan edits with several simultaneous demands.
Versions where the answer is provided in a second panel.
Text-only “where banana” replies.
Edits keeping the BBC desk composition but swapping in other animals.

Legacy / cultural impact

Where Banana is a good example of deliberately broken English as a comic device — a strand of internet humour that runs from lolcats through doge to modern brainrot phrasing. Dropping articles and verbs makes the speaker sound guileless, which makes a demand read as funny rather than entitled.

The format remains in steady use, and the phrase has outgrown the image: “where banana” is now typed as a standalone complaint about anything overdue, by people who have never seen the orangutans or the BBC segment underneath them.