Bateman and Kimball at Lunch / Kimball's Silly Me

About

Patrick Bateman and Detective Kimball at Lunch, also known as Kimball's "Silly Me," is an exploitable meme format used in GIF captions that uses the conversation between Detective Kimball (played by Willem Dafoe) and Patrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale) from the 2000 film American Psycho. It's typically used as a meme where one party has a mistake or misunderstanding that they play off as innocent, which is then believed by Kimball representing another party. Within the context of the movie, the meme is meant for the person making the meme to be purposely doing something wrong, only to be able to talk their way out of it with a flimsy explanation.

Origin

The scene in question from American Psycho, released on April 14th, 2000, is when Detective Kimball starts to push more on Patrick Bateman over a dinner that acts as an interrogation. While trying to recount his whereabouts the night that Paul Allen disappeared, Bateman appears to make a crucial misstep but tries to play it off. Detective Kimball follows along with the blatant lie but starts to turn up the pressure on Bateman. This tension is present in the scene does not translate to its use in the meme template. The clip of Bale and Dafoe was uploaded to YouTube on May 9th, 2009, by the channel Spiral^[1] where it gained over 330,000 views in 12 years (shown below).

The scene was then first used in a meme about Making Mustard Gas by iFunny user Kayla9999^[2] on January 5th, 2022, unironically using the real ingredients needed to make it (shown below).

Spread

The meme template began to spread to other platforms in the following months, with people using the conversation between Bateman and Kimball to cover up for other similar types of mistakes or accidents. An example was posted to the /r/shitposting subreddit by Redditor^[3] Snoo_1567 on April 21st, 2022, in which the mistake being done by Bateman is a racial slur that was blamed on autocorrect, earning over 33,800 upvotes in just over one month (shown below).

On May 16th, 2022, the template was used again by Redditor Sudddhu_,^[4] this time being used as part of a word brain teaser in which the person is being asked what word follows all the conditions, while really it's a statement instead of a question, earning 12,000 upvotes in roughly one month (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References