A taste of what follows: the apple surgeon planning an operation and the broccoli waiting for a single notification. Both reappear further down with the full story behind each joke.
If you have ever seen a doughnut putting on make-up or a broccoli with zero followers, you have probably met the work of Naolito, the pen name of Spanish illustrator Nacho Díaz Arjona. His cartoons take ordinary objects, give them eyes and a tiny pair of legs, and drop them into a situation that suddenly reads as a very human joke.
The gallery below gathers 22 of those drawings, each signed NAOLITO.COM, with a short note on what makes it work: the pun, the film reference or the everyday experience it borrows.
Who is Naolito?
According to his publisher, Planeta, Díaz Arjona comes from Algeciras in the province of Cádiz. He wanted to be an illustrator from childhood, enrolled in nursing studies, and left before finishing because he was spending more time drawing than studying. His drawings are simple and colourful and focus on the ironic side of daily life, and in 2021 Lunwerg published a book of them in Spanish, El lado adorable de la vida (roughly, the adorable side of life).
Naolito has since grown into a studio. Its website describes a team based in Málaga that makes character-driven animation for brands and games, and lists clients such as Netflix, Amazon, PlayStation and Nestlé. The site also cites a following of more than a million people, which helps explain why these images travel so widely across social media, often without the signature that tells viewers who drew them.
How the before-and-after formula works
Many of the best-known Naolito pieces follow a two-panel structure: one object on the left labelled before, a changed version on the right labelled after. The trick is that the change is already true of the object. A pencil really does get shorter when it is sharpened, a cookie really does have spots, and a Rubik's cube really can go from scrambled to solved. The caption simply attaches a human life event to that physical change, and the reader makes the connection in a split second.
The other drawings rely on references most viewers already carry around: the Titanic, Alien, Ghostbusters, The Sixth Sense, the Apple logo or the rules of rock, paper, scissors. Because the joke is built from shared knowledge rather than long text, the same image can be understood in Madrid, Manila or Minneapolis, which is a large part of why visual puns like these spread so easily.
The 22 illustrations, one by one
An hourglass whose upper chamber holds ice cubes instead of sand, melting onto a small planet Earth that is slowly going under. It is the darkest idea in the set: time running out is shown as rising water, a simple picture of climate change and melting ice.
A broccoli floret stands under a social media badge showing zero comments, zero likes and zero followers. The joke borrows the old reputation of broccoli as the vegetable nobody picks, and turns it into online loneliness that most people will recognise.
A Tyrannosaurus rex screams in terror at a decorated Christmas tree. The reason is the star on top: it is drawn with a long tail like a comet, a nod to the asteroid impact that ended the age of the non-avian dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.
One of Naolito's best-known before-and-after pairs: a plain ring of dough becomes a glamorous pink-glazed doughnut with sprinkles. The frosting does the job of make-up, and the doughnut's new eyelashes and smile do the rest.
A tea bag lounges in a cup like a swimmer in a pool and cheerfully confesses that it pees in your drink. It is crude bathroom humour, but it also describes exactly what brewing looks like as the colour spreads out of the bag.
A tall pencil asks for just a trim. After the visit to the sharpener it is a stub surrounded by shavings, which is exactly how many people feel after telling a hairdresser to take off only a little.
A slim little fish before visiting grandma, and a fully inflated pufferfish afterwards. The joke works in almost every culture, because grandparents who keep refilling plates are a near-universal experience.
A dark, rumbling storm cloud waits anxiously outside a door marked toilet, already leaking a few drops, while a relieved white cloud steps out and calls the next in line. Rain becomes a bathroom emergency.
A piñata dressed in black leather gear and holding a riding crop shouts 'Hit me!!'. The adult joke lands because a piñata exists only to be struck at parties, so the costume simply makes its job description explicit.
A doctor apple in a lab coat explains a little incision to a nervous red apple, while a leaflet on the floor promises to show how to become famous. The dotted cutting line matches the bite in the Apple logo, so this is cosmetic surgery for brand fame.
A glass of water looks glum, but its reflection in the pool below appears cheerful. The image plays with the familiar half-empty or half-full question: the same amount of water can look like loss or abundance depending on how you see it.
Two frames of an hourglass: first straining, then visibly relieved once the sand has piled up in the lower bulb. It is a toilet joke told entirely with an object that measures time, without a single word.
An avocado lies on its back in shock as its stone bursts out with the teeth of a xenomorph. Fans of science fiction will recognise the chest-burster scene from Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien, transplanted into a kitchen ingredient.
A scrambled Rubik's cube shuffles along half asleep with a mug; after coffee it is fully solved, every face one colour, and bouncing with nervous energy. It is a neat picture of caffeine making the mind feel ordered, perhaps a little too ordered.
A smooth, plain biscuit before puberty becomes a chocolate-chip cookie afterwards, with a worried expression to match. The chips stand in for teenage spots, a gentle joke about acne that almost everyone goes through.
A rock holds a free-hugs sign, a sheet of paper accepts the hug, and in the last frame the rock is knocked out. Anyone who has played rock, paper, scissors knows the rule behind it: paper covers rock.
Three ghosts sit around a campfire, and the story that frightens them is a picture of a ghost trap of the kind made famous by the 1984 film Ghostbusters. Classic campfire horror is simply turned around to the other side.
A smiling iceberg offers free hugs while an ocean liner with four funnels sails straight towards it. The four funnels point to the Titanic, which sank after striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage in April 1912; the joke depends on knowing how that hug ended.
A carved jack-o'-lantern lies on the pavement behind police tape, with a knife and numbered evidence markers beside it, while a pumpkin officer collects the clues. Halloween carving is reimagined from the pumpkin's point of view as a crime scene.
A frightened coffin with tiny feet whispers the most quoted line from M. Night Shyamalan's 1999 film The Sixth Sense: I see dead people. For a coffin, of course, that is simply the job.
A plain white horse before make-up, and a unicorn with a rainbow mane and horn after it. Like the doughnut, it is a light-hearted take on how dramatically make-up can transform a face, with no mockery of the person wearing it.
A happy handheld games console before college turns into a tired calculator printing a long receipt, its screen reading DEBT, after college. It touches a real nerve: student debt is a major worry for graduates in the United States and many other countries.
Why tiny object jokes are so shareable
Giving a face to a lifeless thing is one of the oldest tools in cartooning, and our brains are primed for it: people readily see faces in clouds, sockets and car fronts, a tendency known as pareidolia. Two dots and a curved line are enough. Once the object has a face, a small expression of worry or relief carries the emotional weight, and the viewer does the rest.
The drawings also stay deliberately gentle. Even the darker ones, such as the melting hourglass or the pumpkin crime scene, use soft colours and round shapes, so the humour feels friendly rather than cruel. That balance between cute and slightly wicked is the signature of the style.
Enjoy the jokes, keep the credit
Images like these are often reposted with the signature cropped off. If you share one, link to the artist's own website or Instagram so other people can find the rest of the work. A good way to look at the collection is to pick one drawing and ask two questions: what is the object literally doing, and what human situation does it remind you of? The gap between those answers is where the joke lives.
Sources: Naolito studio website; Planeta de Libros: author biography of Naolito (Nacho Díaz Arjona); Naolito on Instagram; Naolito on Facebook. All illustrations © Naolito.
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