A local Melbourne band has gone viral around the world and at the same time potentially created a new and undoubtedly hilarious meme.

Behind the viral photo is none other than Poison City favourites and conquerers of China, junk punk legends The Bennies, who are currently touring the United States following the past 12 months that has seen the band cement themselves as one of Australia’s hardest working live acts.

And now they’ve caught global attention for a hilarious new meme they’ve created called the “photobong”. Photobong borrows heavily from  the increasingly popular photobomb phenomenon, where people spoil the photographs of others by unexpectedly appearing in the camera’s field of view as the picture is taken.

And yes, a photobong is exactly what you think it is, someone appearing unexpectedly in the camera’s field of view pulling a bong.

It all started innocently enough a few weeks on the band’s Instagram account, and it’s been catching on from there.

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Send us Ya best photobong!! #thebennies #photobonging

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But last night, things got bigger than the band could have anticipated.

Somebody found the latest “photobong” photo and uploaded it to popular social website Reddit, where it pretty much broke the internet as it skyrocketed up the ranks of submitted stories before finding itself on the second page. Thousands of clicks later, and the hilarious photo has earned the band more than a few new fans from around the world.

“Discovering this band was the best thing to happen today. Thanks man!,” wrote one user, while another had better plans. “Awesome, some music to get me through my uni work today. Or, more likely, some music for me to get smashed listening to this afternoon.”

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The band are enjoying their new found fame, revealing to Music Feeds that “the first photobong we did happened in Canberra about two weeks ago. [Now] we’re in LA and we’re staying with some mates who play in Guttermouth, FuckFace Unstoppable and The Darlings. Been pounding beers over here! There’s also been plenty of bongs around the place, so it just kinda happened again.”

“We wanna try and get it happening now… We’ve still got the rest of the month in the States before we come back home to support NoFX, so gonna have heaps more coming!”

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