This Happened To My Buddy Eric is a popular internet catchphrase used as a non-sequitur response to surreal, horrifying, or impossible situations. The meme originated from a Letterboxd review of the 2019 film Joker, where a user casually commented the phrase under the movie's dark and gritty description. The humor stems from the absolute absurdity of claiming a cinematic or catastrophic event was a personal anecdote involving a generic friend named Eric. It has since evolved into a versatile template where the text is superimposed over images of cosmic horrors, historical disasters, or weird pop culture moments to mock the gravity of the subject matter with a casual, dismissive lie.