Talking Ben is the retired chemistry professor dog from Outfit7's Talking Ben app, part of the Talking Tom and Friends series that began on mobile in the early 2010s. In the app Ben repeats speech, reads the newspaper and answers phone calls, which made clips of his calls easy to turn into memes. The phone drop moment spread through short videos and soundboards as a quick reaction sound, used whenever a conversation collapses, a call ends badly or someone reacts to an answer they did not want.