In 2012, University of Alabama freshman Jack Blankenship's life changed after he was filmed at a college basketball game holding up a massive cutout of his own face. The idea was to distract players from the University of Mississippi, but instead he distracted the entire internet, leading to a wave of interviews, opportunities and ultimately, a job on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.

We recently spoke with Blankenship, also known as the "Alabama Face Guy," over 10 years after his viral time in the spotlight to get the full story of "The Face" and find out what he's been up to since becoming a meme.

Q: Great to talk to you, Jack. So, for those who don't know, who are you, and what are you known for online?

A: Hi, I’m Jack Blankenship. I was known as the Alabama Face Guy meme, which started in 2012 when I brought a giant sign of my own face to University of Alabama basketball games. I would wave it around while the other team shot their free throws, hoping they would miss their shots.

Q: Where did "The Face" come from?

A: The Face was created when my best friends and I, in high school, would do this weird facial gesture together when we were in classes, or on vacation and wanted to photobomb our friends. We would do this weird, goofy face that was an inside joke between all of us.

The way to do The Face was you would flare your nostrils, frown, raise your eyebrows, make your eyes bigger and then inhale. It’s a five-step process.

My friends and I always loved this facial gesture. When college began, I was really excited to hang out with them, but they all started getting girlfriends. As a result, being single, I would go to these basketball games by myself, and to get their attention, I thought, “Oh, I should print out a giant sign of my face and wave it around while the other team does their free throws.” At my college, they had cutouts of celebrities' heads and other players, and I thought it would be a good inside joke, maybe I’d get on TV, maybe [my friends] would see that and get a kick out of it. I would just hold it up and wave it around while they shot their free throws. I would hold the sign, I would do the face and yeah, I was just kind of hoping that the other team would miss their shots.

Q: What's your earliest memory of The Face?

A: My friends and I would always, in middle and high school, we would make videos on my camcorder, and I learned how to edit at a pretty young age. So we would make some of our favorite videos, basically do Lonely Island sketches verbatim, don’t change a single thing. We would recreate them ourselves, I would edit them together, then upload them to like Zenga, YouTube, MySpace and everything.

During one of the videos, it was only me and my friend on set, I would be in the video and also act as the director. We would get done with the take, and we were both in the frame, and I’d be like, "Alright, that’s good." As I walked away, my friend did The Face, and we thought, "That was really funny.” So it kind of just evolved from there to where we would do it on vacation. We had a field trip to New York City, we would go to Times Square and do it, do it with the Mickey Mouses and everything.

The most notoriety it got when I was in high school was when I did it behind Al Roker during our high school field trip. Our group went to a taping of the Today Show. As [Al Roker] was signing off, I just did The Face, without holding the sign. I did The Face, and somebody I knew uploaded a picture of that to a website kind of like Imgur. I had a friend who uploaded that photo online, and it got like 20,000-ish views at the time. Just two years later, I brought this face sign to Alabama basketball games.

Q: Why bring your own face and not a celebrity face?

A: The reason I brought a sign of my own face as opposed to like a celebrity picture, or even a picture of one of the Alabama pictures, was I was just trying to get the attention of my friends. I thought it would be a fun idea to print out a giant sign of my face doing our inside joke and wave it around while the other team was shooting free throws. I knew the game was going to be broadcast on TV, so I was like, ‘Maybe during the game they’ll see me kind of in a wide angle on the court with it and they’ll get a kick out of that.’ I thought it would be more distracting to bring my own face as opposed to a celebrity’s face because there were already a bunch of Kermit the Frogs and other celebrities and characters in there. I was like, if I bring my own face, the players might be like, "Who’s that?"

Little did I know that during the second half, I was sitting under the basket, and I looked to the back right corner of the auditorium, and I see this camera. Above the camera was a tiny red lightbulb that flashed on, and I knew, in that moment, that they were talking about me. So I just stared into the lens as it did a slow, 12-second zoom into my face. I just held The Face as long as I could.

Just doing #TheFace on the Today show (April 2010) pic.twitter.com/gNuuk3TR

— Jack Blankenship (@jack_____enship) February 16, 2012

Q: When did you first see The Face going viral, and what was your reaction to it?

A: The first time I saw the meme go viral was on February 15th, 2012. The night before, Alabama had a basketball game, which was the second game I ever brought the face sign to. I wanted my friends to join me at this game, but it was on Valentine’s Day, and they obviously had better things to do.

So I went to the game myself, held up the sign, and I remember during the game a player for the Florida Gators, Patrick Young, came and dunked the ball. I’d never really held it up when the team was in action, usually just when they did free throws. But I was like, ‘Maybe he misses this when I hold the sign.’ I hold it up, he completes the dunk, he’s a great athlete. Alabama loses the game by like, double digits.

The next morning, February 15th, 2012, I was dejected, I was upset because Alabama had lost the game, and I was single on Valentine’s Day. So I decided to calm my fears and anxieties by going to the public library. As I walked into the public library, I opened my phone to see that a picture of me was posted on Twitter. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool.” Then I had my biology class. During biology class, my phone kept buzzing. I looked at the photo, and it now had like 600 likes.

As class went on, my phone kept buzzing. I looked at my phone again. My teacher’s assistant would not let us use our phones in class, so I had to run to the bathroom to see what was going on. I see that I’m the top post on Reddit, I’m getting hundreds of followers by the minute, and ESPN was tweeting about me. So I walked into my biology class a complete nobody, and I left my biology class as The Alabama Face Guy.

Q: What were the reactions of everyone else online like?

A: I would say the reactions to it were mostly positive. I think when anything goes viral, there are always people complaining about it or being negative about it. You can find that about everything on the internet. But a lot of the reaction was a lot of people just taking the image of me with my sign and either photoshopping me or my sign into The Last Supper, or into the background of President Obama’s inauguration.

Other times, they would cut my face out and put it on Mitt Romney’s face. It was 2012, so a lot of people were latching onto the political aspect of the memes. I would say, overall, the response was pretty positive. I’ve learned not to really read a lot of comments now, but being fresh, getting a lot of attention and views and everything, everyone was like, saying pretty positive things. They were laughing, they were saying “distraction level 1,000” or whatever. It was overall a pretty positive initial reaction to the meme.

Q: Did The Face ever actually have an effect on free throws?

A: Once I started bringing the sign to basketball games, I started doing the math of how teams were shooting, their free throws when they were on the other side of the court vs. when they were facing me holding the sign. The math actually checked out that they were shooting worse at the free throw line when I was holding up my sign. After I went viral, and I was still going to the Alabama games with my sign, the referees would point at me. I got a picture of one of the referees doing The Face, which was a crowning achievement at the time. Even players on the other team were kind of pointing, and as soon as they’d walk into the arena, they’d be talking to each other about seeing me there. That made me feel pretty special.

It did a good job of distracting the team while they’re shooting free throws. I would never say that I helped my team win the game by any stretch of the imagination. At best, I’m the like – I’m not the sixth man or the seventh man – at best, I’m like the thousandth man. But if a free throw gets missed here or there, maybe it can kind of tilt the odds in our favor.

Q: Has the virality of your face sign and face signs in general had an impact on professional basketball games? Are they frowned upon?

A: It’s very funny. Since 2012, I occasionally, just out of habit, look at the security measures for what fans can or cannot bring into games. Throughout the years I occasionally check places I’ve been with the sign, formerly the Staples Centre, now the Crypto.com Arena, or Madison Square Garden, of University of Alabama’s own gym, and these security measures have made it to where the size of the sign you bring, it gets smaller and smaller every year. I don’t feel that I had a specific goal or intention to do that, and I don’t think this is all because of me. But I do notice that a lot of these signs and whatnot, I feel like I see a lot more user-generated, user-created signs of people that they take on their iPhones or whatever, and bring those to games. Even concerts, public events, live tapings of TV shows, I see a lot of those now.

Q: What's the best moment of using the face sign that you can remember?

A: I went viral on February 15th, 2012 and within a week of going viral I was flown up to New York City to be a guest on a bunch of talk shows. While I was in New York, I went to Madison Square Garden to watch the New York Knicks take on the New Jersey Nets. I walked into the arena holding my face sign, and people were coming up to me, taking pictures with me. I get to my seat at the game, and the players on the New York Knicks were pointing and laughing at me.

Throughout the game, people would occasionally see me and ask for a picture. But during the third quarter, a player on the New Jersey Nets, Chris Humphries, got fouled and went to the free throw line. So I start holding up my sign, and he misses his first free throw. I hear cheers erupt from all over Madison Square Garden, even from the upper deck. Then I look at the Jumobtron and see my face there.

I think this is the coolest moment of my entire life until I tilted my head down and saw this woman sitting courtside, pointing and waving at me. I was frozen. Oh my god, that’s Beyonce. She waved at me, I waved back. She was sitting next to one of my favorite rappers of all time, Jay-Z. They were both laughing and waving at me. I thought that was pretty cool. Then the fourth quarter came, and I noticed the Knicks dancers were dancing to a Beyonce song. I thought, ‘This is cool, they’re dancing to a Beyonce song in front of Beyonce, I wonder what her reaction will be.’ I dart my eyes over to Beyonce, and she’s staring back at me doing The Face. She elbowed Jay-Z, and he did it, and then I completely lost my mind. I jumped up and down, I mouthed to Beyonce, ‘You’re my girl Beyonce,’ it was absolutely the coolest moment of my entire life.

Q: Did you ever think the meme would lead to all this? What did you originally think the limits of the meme would be?

A: What I thought the trajectory of my face sign would be is that my friends would see it on ESPN while they’re watching the games with their girlfriends or whatever and that they would just get a kick out of it. Then, after the first game, they really talked about it at length during the broadcast, so I was like, "I’ll bring this to the next game." Then, after the next game, it blew up online.

So then I kind of felt like, after that, I had to keep reinventing myself as the Alabama Face Guy. I made sure I was at every game. I had a lot of fun doing it, I had a lot of people coming up and saying they appreciated what I was doing. I had a really fun time doing it.

Q: How did the meme land you a job on The Tonight Show?

A: When I was flown from Alabama to New York City, it was because The Today Show wanted to talk about me, not only because I was going viral in the moment, but when I was in high school a couple of years earlier I did The Face behind Al Roker. So they were like, "Oh we should bring him on our show, tell the viewers at home that he was on our show two years ago doing it, now he’s a guest."

I did The Today Show, I was on live television. It was a very nerve-wracking experience. The way it was supposed to go is that I was flown into New York City two nights before the show. After the show, I was supposed to fly out.

After I got done with the show, went back to my hotel room, lay down for a bit, got ready to check out, I got a call. They asked if I was available to do The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon that night. So I got my hotel extended another day. I did the interview with Jimmy Fallon, which was a lot of fun. In the years since that interview, I kept in touch with one of the producers. I asked if I could apply to be an intern, applied for an internship and got it. I interned for The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon for a semester, then interned for Saturday Night Live for a semester. Now I work at The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.

It’s been great. I occasionally get to be on the show in very small roles where I’m in costume, or I do a one-line bit and hand a prop to someone on the set. It’s been a lot of fun, I never thought that this would lead to full-time employment at a late-night show. I love working with Jimmy. I’ll see him at like work parties, and he’s always very nice, and it’s been a lot of fun working there. It’s truly a dream come true to turn this sign into living in New York City and being able to have a career because I did something kind of weird at a basketball game.

Q: Did you know that there was an expiration date on the meme from the start, and how did you prepare for that? Did you try and keep it alive as long as possible?

A: I kind of knew going into it that this was going to be a 15-minutes-of-fame kind of thing, but in the age of the internet the perception of 15 minutes can vary from year to year. I definitely tried to hold onto it for as long as I could, but I remember I did a Reddit ask me anything session when I went viral, and one of the top comments was, ‘Have you ever made the face during interc-urse?’ I did not want to answer that, so I ignored it.

However, the comment under that question said, "Top question five hours ago, still hasn’t answered it.. he’s never had interc-urse. Just saw below he’s also an engineering major, confirmed and understandable." So once I saw that comment, I was like, "You know what? 15 minutes of fame is just enough," because you don’t know how tough it is for Reddit to love you one week, and then the next week they accurately call you a virgin.

Once I kind of saw things like that, once I realized that I was going to a lot of the basketball games holding my sign and it wasn’t really affecting the players on the court, it just became something they were seeing all the time. These away teams that were coming to play against Alabama, they were going to other stadiums where people would hold signs of their faces, or celebrities' faces. It felt like the goal of getting the team to miss free throws with these signs wasn’t really working in the way that it did in the beginning. So seeing stuff like that, being dunked on by Redditors, it was like, ‘I think that this thing is basically over.’

Q: What was the last time you held the sign at a game like?

A: During my senior year of college, the University of Alabama had its final home game of the season. I knew this was my last hurrah of bringing my face sign to a basketball game, especially at the University of Alabama. I remember trying to get to the game right when the doors opened. I wanted to soak in the game, soak in being able to be in the front row right at the goal.

I really was able to kind of take a step back and wistfully look back at the last, basically four years, of bringing the face sign to the games. I was able to look back on all the moments of going viral and being able to go on talk shows and concerts and whatnot with my face sign and it was a really good closure moment, especially because the first game I ever went to with my face sign was against the University of Mississippi, and the last game I ever went to was Alabama vs. the University of Mississippi.

Q: Why did you decide to move to New York City?

A: When the meme first went viral, I got recognized on campus everywhere I went. At first, I was very flattered and I was very happy about it, but as the years went on, people would still recognize me. It was mostly pleasant interactions, but it still kind of felt like I couldn’t escape The Face. I couldn’t escape the feeling that somebody’s looking at me, or somebody’s watching me. I went to the University of Alabama, where I’m from, so even when school wasn’t in session, I was there. It got to the point where I needed to move somewhere that I could be a little more anonymous. When I graduated, I decided I needed to move to New York City.

In the years since going viral, I’ve seen less and less people post about it. But occasionally I will be scrolling on Instagram or Twitter or something, or I’ll just be online and the image will pop up and it takes me a second to be like, "Oh that’s me." It’s a happy circumstance when that happens, but it really doesn’t pop up nearly as much as it has in the past.

Q: Now you've got a stage show and have gotten more into live performing. When did that happen?

A: When I moved to New York City I started doing improv classes, then I joined a sketch team and I had a lot of fun being able to be on stage and be less myself. I got to play characters, or write funny situations. I started performing in New York City around 2017, 2018, and then I took a storytelling class at UCB, which is the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York City. It was a storytelling class led by Jeff Hiller, a fantastic comedian, actor and writer. I started to write a lot about the things that would happen when I went viral, and other things that happened in my life. It kind of evolved into a half-hour storytelling show about my rise and fall from fame.

I started performing that in 2019, and I’m still performing it now, because in the years since that happened, a lot of other fun things have happened that have made me want to expand the show, like things I did on the Tonight Show. One thing that happened in particular on The Tonight Show led to me meeting my wife. My virality started with me alone holding a sign, and through the crazy events of my life, led to me meeting my wife. It’s a really fortunate circumstance that this all came from a poster I made on Samsclub.com.

After I got done with the storytelling class, some of these stories, where I was able to reflect on the virality, unfolded into a comedy show called “A Funeral For My Face.” It’s just about my rise and fall from fame, about having 15 minutes of fame and going viral in Alabama. It was basically just a really pleasant opportunity for me to take a step back, reflect on everything that happened with going viral, and what I appreciated, what I didn’t appreciate about it.

Q: Did you ever get the chance to sell out as a meme?

A: I had several opportunities to sell out, and I just had a feeling that … I got approached by an agent that specialized in memes and he wanted to set up a deal with Spencer’s Gifts and the opportunity sounded neat on paper, but it was just something where, I knew if I walked into a Spencer’s Gifts and saw my face on clearance, like 90% off – which was inevitable – that it would truly break me. I only shop in the discount aisles, and if it were me looking at me 75% off, I would feel 100% off.

Q: Any advice for the people who might find themselves going viral and becoming memes?

A: Some of the advice I’d give to other memes or people going viral is that more than likely, it’s going to die before you expect it to. So try to really live in the moment right now, write down everything that’s happening, document it as best as you can with photos and videos and journals and whatnot, and try not to dive into the comments.

It’s impossible to avoid them altogether, but stray away from your worst tendencies when it comes to reading more and more about yourself or about your meme. I think as long as you know that it’s going to die and that it’s going to end before you want it to, try to see if you can use that trajectory to launch you to something you want to achieve, or a goal you have in your life., whether that’s a career thing, or other opportunities in the media, have fun, enjoy it, document everything and just be ready to make your next move.

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A big thanks to Jack Blankenship! You can follow him on Instagram at JackBlankenship. You can also visit his website to learn more about his career, viral meme and his show, "A Funeral For My Face."

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