The British Are Coming
Contents
About
“The British Are Coming” is an image macro built on a painting of Paul Revere galloping through the night with a lantern held high, shouting his warning. A caption sits above the painting, usually in the form "How I feel telling everyone X," where X is some piece of news the poster can't wait to share. It's also known as the Paul Revere Meme or How I Feel After Telling Everyone X, and it mostly spreads on TikTok, X and Tumblr.
Origin
The painting is Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Edward Mason Eggleston. It shows the 1775 ride in which Revere warned colonists that British troops were on the move. On May 4th, 2024, TikTok user @_giomama_ posted the earliest known version, captioned "How I feel telling my friends Kendrick dropped a THIRD song," about Kendrick Lamar's diss track Not Like Us. It got around 694,000 plays.
The format took off in November 2024. On November 22nd, TikTok user @expiredgum4 posted "How mfs felt after telling everyone Kendrick dropped" the day Lamar's album GNX came out, and it passed 11 million plays. Spotify Wrapped, a new Team Fortress 2 comic, the return of Tomodachi Life and the April 2025 4chan hack all got their own versions. TikTok posts often play the U.S. Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps march underneath.
Meaning
The joke is the gap in scale. Revere rode through the night with news that decided a war. The poster is riding just as hard to tell their group chat that an album dropped or a game got announced. It fits any moment where you feel like the first person to know something and have to tell everyone right now.
It's mostly used inside fandoms for release news, gossip and announcements. The tone is self-aware: the poster knows the news isn't that big a deal but plays up the urgency anyway.
Examples
Popularity
See also