Emoji Lore
Sad Cowboy: They Always Say Yeehaw, They Never Ask Haw Yee
The cowboy emoji is already funny. Put the hat on the wrong face and it becomes the most honest emoji in your workspace. This actually happened in stages, and the stages are documented.
By Miles Crawford
First, There Was a Happy Cowboy
Cowboy Hat Face was approved in Unicode 9.0 in 2016 under the formal name "Face with Cowboy Hat," which is a perfect name. As Emojipedia's Emojiology column points out, most vendors did not design a cowboy at all: they took their existing grinning face and put a hat on it. This laziness turned out to be the entire joke engine. A hat is a costume, and a costume can go on anything.
The Sheriff Phase
In June 2017, comedian Brandon Wardell tweeted a sheriff built entirely out of emoji: 🤠 for a head, 👇 for hands, 👢 for boots, a torso made of 💯. It spawned thousands of remix sheriffs, a Dunkin' Donuts brand tweet (historic lows for everyone), and an automated bot that mints new sheriffs to this day. The internet had learned that 🤠 is not an emoji. It is a genre.
The Howdy Family
On July 26, 2017, a Facebook user named trashnymph posted the cowboy hat photoshopped onto the pouting, thinking, smirking, and pensive faces, captioned "unemployment has gifted me with the free time to build a howdy family," per Know Your Meme's record. The pensive one - a tiny frown under a very confident hat - was the clear standout.
That October, the caption that would define him arrived: "they always say yee haw they never ask haw yee," good for over 100,000 retweets. In March 2018 a side-by-side of 😔 and sad cowboy labeled "hurt by nin vs hurt by johnny cash" ran up another 15,000, and Mashable declared him "the most tragic figure in the Wild West." Someone carved him into a jack-o'-lantern that first Halloween, which is how you know an emoji has made it: people will spend four hours with a gourd to prove they are sad, but whimsically.
What He Actually Means
Emojipedia's read on the original 🤠 is that the hat signals "yee-haw exuberance," whimsy, and confidence. Sad cowboy runs the same hardware with the battery dead. The grin is gone. The hat remains. The hat is the important part, because the hat says he was ready for a good time, and the face says it did not happen. That gap between headwear and mood is the entire emotional register of a work chat, which is why he never really left.
Why He Works at Work
Regular 🤠 is for good news delivered with swagger: deployed early, closed the deal, fixed it on the first try. Sad cowboy is the exact same energy after it goes wrong. The build failed again. The customer churned. Your code review came back with forty-seven comments and one of them just says "why." Haw yee, indeed. He is also the only socially acceptable response when a coworker says "yeehaw" about something that is clearly going to hurt.
The cowboy pack covers the full emotional range of the frontier, and the emoji maker can put the hat on whatever your team has done this week.