Shut Up and Take My Money

“Shut up and take my money!” is a catchphrase for enthusiastic approval of a product or idea, commonly represented by an image macro of Fry from Futurama.

The source scene comes from Futurama’s “Attack of the Killer App,” which originally aired on July 1, 2010. After Mom Industries releases the eyePhone, a parody of the iPhone, Fry tries to buy one; when the cashier warns him about reception and battery-life problems, Fry interrupts while waving several dollar bills and says, “Shut up and take my money!”

Know Your Meme’s account places the earliest located meme use on the following day, when the German technology blog Crackajack published a post about the episode containing a Fry image macro captioned “Shut up and take my money!” This is a documented early use rather than a proven absolute first, and the supplied account does not identify the macro’s maker or give an exact calendar date for the post.

The phrase became a way to title forum and image-board posts about desired products, inventions, and proposed ideas. On March 7, 2011, Reddit user calivessel submitted a photograph of a credit card printed with the Fry image to r/pics; the post reached Reddit’s front page and accumulated more than 4,000 upvotes before it was archived, while r/shutupandtakemymoney was created on April 26, 2011, for gadget and novelty-item posts.

The Fry image also became an exploitable template built around the fill-in phrase “Shut up and take my (X)!”

The meme is documented on FunnyJunk, Tumblr, and deviantArt, and a Facebook page titled “Shut Up and Take My Money” had received 1,895 likes as of March 7, 2012.

Separate from its forum, image-board, and subreddit circulation, the domain shutupandtakemymoney.com was registered on May 3, 2011, for a gadget and novelty-items retail website.

The joke’s setup and payoff are compressed into a clear contrast: a cashier gives practical warnings about the eyePhone’s reception and battery life, and Fry cuts him off by thrusting forward money and demanding the purchase. The later image macro makes that interruption repeatable by pairing Fry’s money-waving pose with the same emphatic caption.