How brainrot humour infected the internet with surreal gibberish (2024)

2July 2024

Hit play. The camera pans toward a white toilet in a nondescript, brown-walled bathroom. Suddenly, a quivering face with a scarily elongated neck rises from the bowl. “Skibidi Biden!” the face shrieks, its eyes twitching between bulging anime orbs and the current US president’s thin, blue set. The head dances back and forth, convulsing in sync with the camera. “Skibidi Biden Joe Joe Joe!” it repeats in a sickly shudder, like a baby ogre that won’t stop retching. This frightening blast of weirdness (surrealist comedy sketch? Campaign ad to reach prospective 14-year-old voters?) is a parody of “Skibidi Toilet,” a mega-popular animated YouTube series about flesh-toilets fighting a vicious war against evil entities with intricate weapons. The short clip premiered to millions of casual TV viewers on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

Over the last year, the internet has flooded with an ever-increasing slurry of nonsense phrases – what some call “brainrot humour”. It’s the juvenile delirium that spawns in deeply puerile digital spaces like 4chan and Roblox — the niche language of self-loathing incels and Fortnite tweens who describe themselves as “sigma males” and obsess over masturbation practices like “edging” and “gooning”. People began to use the terms ironically and absurdly, turning rizz into “Rizzard of Oz”, stretching them in hilariously weird ways. Yet what was once a niche obsession has gone mainstream, and irreversibly warped the way people speak online. It’s leaked so far into the collective consciousness there are marketing guidebooks on how to adapt to the “rizz era” and a viral fad where people dub brainrot dialogue over popular TV shows and movies. People have made comprehensive brainrot dictionaries and tier lists ranking the words.

Read More

This “brainrot humour” moment feels like the latest in a lineage of internet culture eras. For teens in the mid-2010s, there were “MLG” jokes: think 420blazeit, Mountain Dew and Doritos, Sample Text, Snoop Dogg smoking a joint, 360-noscope gags, the chicken-scratch mutation of Sonic called Sanic. By the late 2010s, MLG was done to death: the original pioneers were calling it cringe; a professional editor for the now-defunct media company Super Deluxe made an MLG-themed advertisem*nt for Hillary Clinton (similar to “Skibidi Biden”). What distinguishes brainrot humour is the speed and intensity with which it has taken over pop culture and been run into the ground, zooming from nothing to annoying super-saturation in an instant.

The brainrot lexicon exploded late last year. There was Fanum tax (taking a bit of your friend’s food, inspired by the streamer Fanum), Ohio (deployed to describe anything bizarre or outlandish), gyatt (big butt), Grimace shake (a trend where kids pretended a McDonald’s drink killed them), Livvy Dunne Just Rizzed Up Baby Gronk (an idiocy too layered to explain). The lingo soared after twenty-somethings made TikToks blaming it on Generation Alpha, the group of kids born after 2010. (This was partly a delusion, as Gen Z was just as big a booster of the brainrot – Fanum and Skibidi Toilet’s creator are both 26, after all). Gen Zers fretted over the fatally online freakiness of the language and worried they were becoming culturally obsolete.

The demented dialect solidified with the wild popularity of “Sticking Out Your Gyatt For The Rizzler,” which replaced the lyrics of SUICIDAL-IDOL’s shadowy “ecstasy” with a squeaky voice mewling Gen Alpha buzzwords: “You’re so skibidi, you’re so fanum tax, I just wanna be your sigma.” The tune broke the internet in late 2023, hitting 10 million plays across platforms. It sparked a TikTok trend where people parodied genres and popular artists – hyperpop to metal to Midwest emo to Mitski’s “Washing Machine Heart” – with sense-shattered lyrics. The way the song and the parody craze linked all the words together cemented them as a distinct “subgenre” of language: catchphrases that signify deep internet addiction in the 2020s.

Over the last few months, brainrot humour has infested and congested the web, propelled in part by a new wave of AI tools that let clout-hungry creators pump out copy-paste gibberish. There’s a slew of “Brainrot Races,” where batches of bouncy balls fall down a series of winding paths. Each ball has the face of a meme character on it (a recent video featured Skibidi Toilet battling against an animated larva that grunts “Oi Oi” and a creature called “Smurf Cat”), and whenever a ball takes the lead, it begins singing a certain song in an AI-generated voice. The latest micro-fad is “AP Brainrot Exams”. Robotic narrators like “Professor Dingle” and AI SpongeBobs and Ice Spices quiz viewers on the most convoluted brainrot, starting with “Easy” questions and leveling up to genuinely esoteric internet culture. There are questions about TikTok Rizz Party attendee Turkish Quandale Dingle, the doofy pig-human John Pork, and Little John, an animated dude who’s perpetually renovating his 0.1-square-meter apartments on the TikTok page Home Design.

@fort_history What brain rot should I do next? #fortnite #brainrot #edit #youngsheldonedit ♬ original sound - Fort History

The brainrot seems to actually be rotting peoples’ brains, morphing social media into a wasteland of AI SpongeBob deepfakes and Skibidi memes. Many TikTok comment sections are inundated with so much of the same copypasta – ”real,” ”bro’s crashing out,” “W aura,” “god-tier rizz” – you could mistake the viewers for bots. At worst, there are faceless pages like “Brain Nourishment,” which racked up 100,000 followers by disgorging dozens of brainrot ball races a week; and the fake music label “Rizz Records,” which is dedicated to egregious AI parodies of popular songs.

What made brainrot so thrilling in the beginning was the shock of seeing something deeply online and deeply dumb go so mainstream, to the point where grandma influencers were talking about mewing and mogging. But now being terminally online feels banal since everyone is already terminally online, and the brainrot has lost its aura of weirdness.

Still, there are flecks of inventive genius inside the sh*tpost swamp – like a high school teacher’s hyper-technical, baffling chemistry lessons referencing the “Osamawalk.” There’s something irresistibly fun about the way the most peculiar brainrot bamboozles the uninitiated, like the alarmed zoomers who thought they were fossils. Thankfully, this deluge of linguistic detritus is only a hint of what’s to come when Gen Alpha really takes over. The kids nursed on Cocomelon and Kai Cenat are clearly even more obsessed with inane absurdism than Gen Z. Who knows what’ll come next – how can you get more fried and freaky than girthmaxxing? Maybe language will finally break for good and we’ll just communicate in silly squeaks.