skibidi toilet is just nihilistic potato xD content
don't be afraid, it's just the internet
Lately I have had a few parents mention to me how they are scared by the content they see their children consuming online. “My child is watching the weirdest, darkest content on TikTok,” they fret. “It’s all these strange, edited apocalyptic videos. Is this normal? Are they okay? It worries me.”
Then they show me the videos. A disembodied head in a toilet with a Joker-like smile who wants to take over the world. Its neck stretches out, its mouth detaching eerily from its face as a jutting audio plays. Sometimes, the heads are in a public urinal inside an elevator, or in an abandoned Mario Kart track, or in the smoking remains of a nondescript city. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” I say. “That’s just skibidi toilet.”
With over 15.7 billion views on TikTok, Skibidi Toilet has become one of the biggest trends among young users online. It’s made appearances at Chuck E. Cheese, become merchandised, and voted by YouTube as the trend of the year in the platform’s annual recap report. At a Google press event I attended in December, they had a live Skibidi Toilet performance, featuring dancers in full costume, to the confusion of many attendees. Most importantly, there is just so much discourse around what it is, as we decrepit Gen Zers and beyond learn about this newfangled thing that The Kids are so into.
The discourse that I see around Skibidi Toilet feels not unlike when parents freak out every year about drugs in Halloween candy, and the subsequent memes that are built off of it — hysteria created by the preposterousness of the headline, and people who continue the joke based on said hysteria. Have you heard of this insane thing? Isn’t it insane? Young people always love to prove to older people that they’re old and that’s embarrassing, with vernacular and memes (usually first created in Black internet spaces) that have the most outlandish quality, like how “rizz” has gone from a word that felt like it was only understood by a certain online in-crowd, to now, where it’s Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year and that feels corny.
At its most base layer, Skibidi Toilet doesn’t really add anything new to the table. It’s random humor, not so different from a show like iCarly in essence, which relied heavily on erraticism for its jokes, from the character of Gibby to the recurring food on a stick to of course, the random dancing segment. Many people compare the pull of it to a franchise like Five Nights at Freddy’s, which is also, to some extent, just kind of silly. Skibidi Toilet isn’t even violent, necessarily — the videos I’ve seen are just the heads popping up from nowhere, maybe battling out, head to fist, with their nemeses, the stereo-head people.
What I do think is different is the visual presentation of the random humor, and this is probably why some parents are so shocked by it. At its most surface level, millennial internet humor was ultimately optimistic (“it’s an avocado, thanks”) — the core-edit videos teasing this generation often show people talking in silly voices, dramatically hugging, dancing or squealing over food, and expressing their excitement with their era of slang that more or less gargles the English language (“ermagherd,” “gorl,” “boi”). None of these actions are morally objectionable per se, but I think this overused and rather performative optimism feels hackneyed now, which is one of the many reasons why people make fun of it.*
That visual genre of random humor just might not feel relatable anymore. The world is on fire, and our humor has only grown increasingly dark to match how life tonally feels right now. Just look at what has gone viral in the past year: lobotomies, looksmaxxing, George Santos. Not to say that wholesome humor is dead, but the way we joke about things have only gotten more fried-through — take the Grimace Shake, as a regular meme that might have been riffed on in a much different way ten years ago. What’s edgy and cool is still shaped, to some extent, by older people with bigger brains, and kids want in on what’s edgy and cool, so these influences are important to mention. The internet only really holds up an exacerbated mirror to the world in many ways.
Now, Skibidi Toilet fits in perfectly with the genre of content known as “brainrot lore,” completely nonsensical humor intended to smooth your thoughts over, while still really at its center being humor that works for kids: music, storyline, imitable dances and phrases. Beyond that, it’s also got a name that children can take to their parents and elicit the best kind of response from — a feeling that they’re in the know and the adults are not. Plus, it’s a toilet, which is always a winning joke.
There are a lot of scary things on the internet, but it’s important to be an active user when being confronted with your consumption of this entity that is both information and entertainment. What can look scary might not actually be, and what might appear innocuous can actually undo a lot of harm. And most importantly, while there are a lot of problems online, sometimes — like Swifties bullying the IDF over its propaganda, or people making fun of misogynistic comedian Matt Rife for his odds of winning a sheet metal eating contest — it is very, very good.
*Some others being: the internet has progressed beyond it by now, so much of is just white creators, and a timeless tradition of mean 13-year-olds making fun of anyone older than them.
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Since we last spoke, I wrote a piece on Asian masculinity online for Teen Vogue and was on a panel for Digital Void Media. I am no longer reporting at Forbes and am looking forward to spending my holidays writing more for you all <3
McSweeney's has recently shared a Millennial captcha. One of the prompts was, in fact, "what is skibidi toilet". I laughed too much and then I had to google it. I thought it was a song from the Russian band Little Big. I'm not only a Millennial, I am also European. That's a combo!