Bad Luck Brian

Bad Luck Brian is an image macro built around a deliberately awful school portrait of Kyle Craven: red face, braces, plaid sweater vest and an uneasy grin. The top-and-bottom captions give him a minor goal, then an absurdly disastrous outcome.

The photograph was taken for Craven’s 2005–06 high-school yearbook. He has said he intentionally made it bad and was required to retake it; the rejected version survived as a scan.

On January 23, 2012, Craven’s friend Ian Davies posted the image to Reddit’s Advice Animals community. The first post attracted little attention, but a subsequent version spread through the image-macro ecosystem. January 23, 2012 is the supported first-seen date for the meme, distinct from the older photograph.

The character fit the Advice Animals formula perfectly: the face supplied instant embarrassment and each new caption supplied a fresh, escalating failure. It moved from Reddit to Tumblr, Facebook, FunnyJunk, Pinterest and listicle sites during 2012.

Craven participated in the afterlife rather than disappearing behind the template. He did an AMA, appeared with Overly Attached Girlfriend in a 2013 sketch and licensed the character for merchandise and advertising.

The 2018 McDonald’s spot explicitly turned his bad fortune into the joke, and Craven later sold an NFT of the original image in 2021. The working YouTube embed is a useful mid-story record of how a classic image macro became a recognizable commercial character.