From April 2-6, Warner Bros. is running a special event in their free-to-play mobile RPG Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem featuring a chubby variant of Bugs Bunny, now officially called "Big Chungus." This version of Bugs first appeared in a 1941 animated short called Wabbit Twouble, though he was not any sort of chungus in a formal capacity until now. Sweet children and sad adults hooked on the title might assume that this new fat rabbit is just another wacky original concept. But anyone who farted around gaming Twitter for the past few years is likely aware that Big Chungus started with a meme in 2018.
Or did he?
They say that explaining a joke is the best way to kill it. That goes triple for "random internet humor" that thrives off the appearance of coming out of nowhere and meaning nothing.
Friends, nothing is random. Everything has meaning, and everything comes from somewhere. Even Chungus. Especially Chungus.
No one knows exactly who was the first person to say the word "chungus." It could have been a caveman. It could have been your dad. It could have been the famous Meatloaf, mispronouncing his own stage name in Vietnamese in a weak, sweaty attempt to sound cultured. When it comes to social media though, this off-hand tweet from 2010 is often cited as the oldest chungus utterance.
