高雅人士gāo yǎ rén shì

高雅 means “refined, elegant”, and 人士 is a formal word for “person”, the kind you see in news reports. The joke is the formal words on a waddling cartoon penguin.

You use it for yourself when you stay calm about something stressful: Monday morning, a thesis defense, exam results. You use it for a friend who is acting posh. Or you just send the sticker.

It is current. 高雅人士 is now a sticker and a nickname. Captions put the penguin into everyday life, such as 高雅人士视察中, “a refined person is inspecting”, on a photo of your desk. Calling a friend 高雅人士 is teasing, but friendly.

The penguin is a 3D stock image. The artist 3Dalia uploaded the set to Shutterstock in 2014, according to Beijing News and ifeng. A Chinese stock library later listed it as the “William Tell penguin”.

At the end of 2024, someone found it in a free stock library and made an AI video of it dancing, Beijing News reports. In 2025, around the Mid-Autumn Festival, people set the dance to an old song about the moon, and it spread on WeChat, Bilibili and Xiaohongshu.

Many people think it comes from the film Madagascar. It does not, though it looks a lot like the film’s penguins. By November 2025, people were copying its dance in suits, putting it into photos of subway cars and cafés, and making their own 表情包, stickers, from it.