First Time? Meme Generator
Drag text anywhere on the First Time? template, style every box its own way, drop in your own images, then download, copy, or share it.
Click a text box to edit it. Drag to move, corners resize, top handle rotates.
What is the First Time? meme?
First Time? shows James Franco as a cowboy standing on the gallows with a noose around his neck and a calm, knowing half-smile. In the scene the man next to him is panicking, and Franco's character turns and asks, coolly, "first time?" because he has been in this situation before. As a meme it is used whenever a veteran of some recurring disaster watches a newcomer freak out about it: the joke is the veteran's weary calm in the face of something genuinely terrible.
Origin: The scene is from the Coen brothers' Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), released on Netflix, in the segment "Near Algodones". It spread as a meme after the trailer came out in September 2018.
Also known as: James Franco First Time, First Time Meme, Hanging Cowboy First Time.
How to use the First Time? meme
There is one text box, used for the newcomer's panic or the situation they are facing for the first time. Franco's face and the familiar line "first time?" supply the punchline, though some people write the line into the caption too.
Great fits are recurring miseries that veterans have stopped reacting to: production outages, final exam season, a franchise's yearly playoff collapse, a game's server crash on launch day. Frame it as a newcomer crying out so Franco's calm has something to contrast with.
First Time? meme ideas
- you broke prod on your first day?
- your game's servers crashed on launch day?
- your team blew a 20-point lead?
- your group project partner disappeared?
- the printer jammed right before the deadline?
- you got ghosted after one date?
About the First Time? meme template
The First Time? template (first-time) supports 1 line of text. A classic example reads “you broke prod on your first day?”. Read about its origin on knowyourmeme.com.
Use it from the API
This meme is also just a URL. Replace the text in the path to generate your own image:
https://memegenscript.com/images/first-time/you_broke_prod_on_your_first_day~q.png
