Accordingly, the sub’s rules state that “Titles must start with ‘Roses are red,’” and posts must follow one of three acceptable rhyme formats. It’s a fittingly formal set of rules for a format that, as we’ve seen, has become less a fixed poem than a template waiting to be filled in. One of the sub’s formats is particularly telling: “Setup in title, punchline in the post.” Basically, they say it should be like a two-line poem: the title provides the setup, while the image—usually a screenshot or picture that contains text—provides the punchline.
Much like the rhyme itself, variations of the formula seem to have had quite a few different lives online. Although r/rosesarered was created in October 2009, Know Your Meme traces examples back to at least 2006, when someone asked Yahoo Answers users for funny “Roses are red, violets are blue” poems. In 2012, an r/AskReddit user posed a similar question, asking people to share their best “Roses are red” poems. Some of these were incorporated into Valentine’s Day e-cards on Tumblr.
The particular format we see on r/rosesarered, though—where a “Roses are red” setup is followed by “a screengrab of a headline or a YouTube video title that completes the rhyme and serves as the punchline”—was described by The Daily Dot in 2016 as “a more recent mutation,” one that could only be possible “in the contemporary garbage heap of online.”
Now, with that centuries-old setup firmly established, let’s see what Reddit did with the punchline.
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