Johannes Haasbroek · Follow
8 min read · Aug 1, 2023
The internet is, and probably always will be, weird.
Peculiar video clips coupled with popular or catchy music remixed into surreal parody is almost a calling card of internet denizens. These videos sprout up in super-niche underground groups where they gather steam until, seemingly overnight, they dominate major social media platforms such as YouTube or TikTok.
But these outbreaks never last long.
A few days. Maybe a week or even a few months.
Only a selected few slang phrases or videos survive the internet’s ravenous hunger for novelty.
At first glance, it appeared that “Trrr Skibidi Dop Dop Yes Yes,” was not one of those remixes destined to grace our collective ear channels beyond the customary few months.
What makes Skibidi different?
The exact origin of the audio is hazy, marid in remixes and re-edits as various artists tapped into the craze.
One Google search claims it was initially part of the chorus of “Biser King Dom Dom Yes Yes” by Müzik Dağıtım, which artist Dubskie later remixed. Yet Another Google search claims that Bulgarian singer Fiki was responsible for creating the song.
Honestly, it does not matter.
I am not particularly drawn to the exact provenance and artistic attribution of Skibidi. What interests me is the application.
So, what makes Skibidi different?
Honestly?
Not that much.
It’s a catchy earworm, making it an ideal audio accompaniment for short-form video content, but that hardly sets it apart from other super-popular music templates, such as a sped-up version of “Cupid” by South Korean girl group Fifty Fifty.
Nope.
What truly set Skibidi apart is what happened on February 7, 2023. On that day, Youtuber DaFuq!?Boom! uploaded what would become something truly unique.
Enter the toilets!
Okay, full disclosure. Skibidi toilet is bizarre, even by internet standards.
The original video features a rapid zoom shot where the camera focuses on a bathroom in some undisclosed location. Suddenly, a head pops out from the toilet bowl, its lips synced to the catchy Skibidi.
The head twists and gyrates briefly before popping out at the camera in a Five Nights at Freddy’s style jumpscare.
Right off the bat, it’s clear that the video is meant to be surreal and off-putting — a tried and tested formula for creating viral content on YouTube and other social media platforms.
Still, it appeared that “DaFuq!?Boom!” (Trust me, weird/offensive internet usernames will be the least bizarre aspect in this roller-coaster of a tale) was on to something.
He would continue posting other videos, each more bizarre than the last, but nothing struck a chord with his audience quite like a head popping out of a toilet, lip-synced in Source Filmmaker to an already weird piece of audio.
Obviously, he capitalized on this trend. But instead of milking a profitable formula with ample social proof, Boom (yeah, I am not writing that whole name every time) started experimenting and, by pure happenstance, developed a fever dream into something different. Something more.
What is the appeal?
I can’t really explain why I am so intrigued by this thing.
It’s nothing but a bunch of random videos featuring lip-synced animated toilet heads optimized to take advantage of YouTube’s new short-form format, YouTube Shorts.
It’s a craze, is what I am saying. One that is destined to blow over and make room for the next “thing,” the Internet will lose its collective mind over.
Or maybe not.
See, the more I watched, the more I realized there was something more to Skibidi toilet than just a simple cash-in on the internet’s obsession for bizarre novelty.
30-second video by 30-second video, Boom was building an entire horror universe with its own internal lore and mythos.
For example, despite their prominence in nearly every short, the toilet heads (yes, plural!) aren’t actually the heroes. They’re unambiguously presented as the primary antagonistic force. In a great many ways, they remind me of H.G Well’s War of the World Tripods with elements of the early odds’ zombie hordes with their need to spread the virus as far as possible sprinkled in.
Boom fully embraces the uncanny valley effect of these “things.” Their over-enthusiastic smiles and singing are the main ingredients in fostering a sense of dread in the viewer.
But any good antagonist needs its corresponding and opposite protagonist. Around episode 8 (If you can even call a 30-second video an episode), Boom introduces an opposing team to combat the spreading hoard.
Simply referred to as “Cameramen,” these black-suited entities with their closed-circuit television camera heads act as the heroes in this war between camera and toilets. (Now there is a combination of words I never thought I would type!)
This ongoing war serves as the central background to Skibidi toilet. Taking a page from Marvel, Boom has also expanded the world of Skibidi toilet. At first, the first few episodes focused on small-scale conflicts, little more than street scuffles, really.
But as Boom grew more comfortable with the core idea of the Skibidi toilet, he started adding different-sized cameramen and toilets, each with its unique traits. These range from the Titan Speakermen, who tower far over the viewer, to the miniature cameras fitted to RC cars.
Boom evidently had the time of his life thinking up every aspect of this bizarre war. This attention to detail gives the world of Skibidi toilet an odd charm despite its sense of gritty realism.
Despite their freakish appearance, you almost can’t help but root for the faceless cameramen. What they lack in facial expression, they compensate in their body language and hand gestures.
It’s a classic example of “show, don’t tell.”
Something extra
Admittedly, Skibidi toilet has a darker “plot” than most, but it’s not the first time that filmmakers found great success telling stories based on non-human characters.
Think of Toy Story. Or Ants or Monster Inc.
All great non-human stories that are beloved by fans.
In fact, those stories go the extra mile by including an actual plot with relatable characters.
Once you step back from the surreal setting and in-your-face horror, you realize that Skibidi toilet is little more than a generic monster of the week action comic. Eventually, the novelty will wear off, and people will start looking for their daily dose of horror elsewhere.
Maybe so.
But there is something else that Boom has utilized to keep this war of toilets and cameras uniquely personal and grounded. Something subtle that often gets overlooked in the hyperbolic news stories covering the phenomenon of Skibidi toilet.
That subtle element is the way the viewer is portrayed. Not as a passive observer removed from the action. But as an actual combatant. One that is far from immortal.
The appeal of “realness”
A few days ago, I watched Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning.
It was an enjoyable, high-octan romp with Cruise and pals, but as I watched the ageless one perform yet another of his iconic sprints, arms pumping like a pair of high-performance jackhammers, atop some exotic airport, I realized something.
This isn’t something I’ll ever experience.
Mission Impossible is all about exotic locations and super physically attractive actors playing cat and mouse with each other with the fate of the world in the balance.
At no point will Tom Cruise or his costars have to deal with long lines at the baggage carousel, irritable border officers, or an inability to understand the local taxi driver who will probably rip you off.
And I realize that is the whole point of this series. People want to escape the mundane and the minutiae of daily life.
But there comes a point when I no longer identify with Ethan Hunt. I have never faced the end of the world seven times in a row. I have never lost 2–3 love interests to maniacal supervillains. Nor do I work for a super cool government agency with a limitless budget to invest in every kind of gadget you can think of.
But I can identify with a low-level grunt stuck in the middle of a war, the outcome of which he has no control over.
I am not against escapism. But at some point, I want to experience something different. Something that speaks to me on a deeper level.
We’re coming to the tail-end of the superhero craze, a genre that has dominated the film industry for 15 years. I enjoy my corny jokes and spandex as much as the next nerd, but if I have to sit through one more cooky-cutter super flick with yet another world-destroying villain exchanging pithy quips and one-liners with the heroes, I’ll scream Skibidi into the nearest toilet.
Years ago, Canadian video game critic Raycevick created a YouTube video documenting Call of Duty’s fall from a humble boots-on-the-ground FPS game trying to capture the scope of WW2 to the Dorito chomping, kill-streak-obsessed meme we all love to hate today.
A quote in Raycevick’s video has always stuck with me regarding Call of Duty 2, a game that takes place smack in the middle of World War 2.
“Call of Duty 2 isn’t about set pieces or pseudo quick time events. It’s about surviving the most devastating human conflict in all of history.”
Skibidi toilet has something similar.
Despite all the epic set pieces, kaiju-sized super speakermen battling with equally massive toilets, none of the events are meant to empower the viewer.
We witness it all from the perspective of a lowly grunt cameraman. In many ways, this cameraman is just as powerless as the viewer. And sometimes, “POV Cameraman,” as he is called on the wiki, dies. And rather gruesomely at that.
Can you imagine something like Mission Impossible doing that?
For real.
Not the predictable fakeout they have been pulling for the past five movies, but actually committing and killing off Ethan Hunt?
I know. I know. It won’t happen.
Both from a contracting and a storytelling (not to mention marketing) perspective, killing off your lead character is not viable for any big movie franchises.
In that way, Skibidi toilet is unique. It can experiment with non-linear storytelling and characterization in a way even the most avant-garde mainstream director can only hope to mimic.
Skibidi Toilet is also the first massively popular YouTube series that truly takes advantage of the intimate, almost claustrophobic feeling that YouTube Shorts’s vertical format gives. This is a much-needed improvement from the rehashed Tik-Tok content and soulless text-to-speech audio over Minecraft gameplay that has dominated the Shorts landscape so far.
Conclusion
So… would I recommend you check out Skibidi Toilet?
Probably not.
It’s a weird fever dream of a roller-coaster that is definitely not for everyone.
Honestly, I can’t quite explain why I wanted to write this article.
At the end of the day, Skibidi Toilet is just a bunch of weird videos some guy made in his basem*nt.
They’re empty fluff you spend 10–20 minutes watching before going, “Well, that happened,” and going about your day.
Like all internet sensations, Skibidi Toilet will probably disappear into the digital void whence it came, only to be replaced by the “Next Big Thing ™.”
Still, something about these videos intrigues me. I genuinely feel that Skibidi Toilet is more than just “the internet being weird about something again.”
There is a level of artistic expression and ingenuity in these 30-second videos that makes them stand out from the common meme or viral video.
It feels as if we’re on the brink of something new. Something that bucks the established trends and predictable narratives the entertainment industry has been producing over the past decade.
Will anything come from this new frontier?
Who knows.
That mixture of unpredictability combined with a thirst for novelty is what makes the internet so wonderfully weird.
