The Shelley Duvall meme, also known as The Shining typewriter meme, appropriates a scene from Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film in which the character Wendy finds her husband Jack's (played by Jack Nicholson) work in his typewriter. The gag first appeared in 2018 and saw a resurgence on July 11, 2024, following Duvall's passing.
The actress has also been subject to a popular TikTok trend derived from a supercut of her introduction line in Faerie Tale Theatre.
This particular Shelley Duvall meme shows her as Wendy Torrence in the film adaptation of King's The Shining. It's the scene where she discovers Jack's typewriter, and nervously approaches it to read what he's been writing all the time they've been in the Overlook Hotel, only to find the repeated line: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
Below Duvall's face as she peers down is the typewriter paper, but instead of the ironic sentence, the meme inserts other repeated messages, lines from popular TV shows, song lyrics, or copypasta.
Going back to the very beginning, Steven King published The Shining on January 28, 1977, and the film version was released to general audiences in the U.S. on May 23, 1980. Both novel and movie received critical acclaim and certain moments from the film have been used for jokes ever since, including the scenes around the typewriter.
The first instance of a meme using the screenshot of Duvall looking down at the page appeared on October 28, 2018, on the Facebook page "Writing About Writing" by writer and blogger Chris Brecheens. The image shot was flanked by a simple caption that said "you should be writing."
To writers, this was deeply effective horror content.
The image from the 2024 Shelley Duvall meme, which includes a view of the typewriter page, appeared on Imgflip on May 15, 2022, as a blank template. On June 24, 2023, an Imgflip user finally took advantage of the template by inserting the lyrics from "We Like to Party" by the Dutch Eurodance music group Vengaboys.
The Duvall typewriter meme didn't start its viral spread until June 10, 2024, when Twitter user @EmilioEmm posted it with a line from a TikTok video from late 2022. In this video, a woman named Rachel successfully pranks her mom by telling her that Jesus has been spotted in Ohio. As she breaks down crying, Rachel's mom begs her to send the report or footage of the Jesus sighting to her phone.
@cryinglawyer when your mom doesn’t care about celebrities just Jesus #celebrityprank #parentparent #christmas #christmasmiracle ♬ original sound - my name’s not rachel
"Show it to me, please," she says. "Send it to me, Rachel."
The reference to the viral video with the Shelley Duvall meme resulted in the exploitable template taking off on Twitter. Reddit, and Tumblr. Interest in the meme spiked again on July 11 following reports of the actress's death at age 75.
Another popular meme featuring Shelley Duvall flooded TikTok in the summer of 2023. This one made use of a supercut of the actress introducing herself that was posted to YouTube on October 16, 2010. Her repeated introduction is from a live-action fairytale anthology TV series called Faerie Tale Theatre that ran from 1982 to 1987.
Duvall was the show's creator and executive producer as well as the one who began each episode with the line "hello, I'm Shelley Duvall" in a similar cadence with different outfits. She often appeared in classic fairy tale settings such as outside of a cottage or perches on a giant beanstalk.
In 2023, TikTok users began to use the audio from the supercut in videos showing off their own outfits or simply lip-syncing to her voice.
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