Paula Deen Riding Things is a classic photoshop meme that originated from a 2011 photograph of celebrity chef Paula Deen hitching a piggyback ride on fellow chef Robert Irvine during a food festival. The internet was immediately captivated by Deen's exuberant expression and arms-wide-open pose, leading to a surge of exploitable edits where she was cut out and placed onto various objects, animals, and historical events. From riding the Nyan Cat to perched atop a Great White Shark, the meme celebrates the absurdity of her public persona and her well-known love for butter. It is widely used to represent someone enthusiastically entering a situation or to create surreal, nonsensical humor that remains a staple of early 2010s internet culture.