“Brain rot” is the term commonly used to describe the form of comedy that has taken over social media for younger generations such as Generation Z and Generation Alpha. These generations are the ones most commonly using social media and technology and the constantly evolving web of media and entertainment that comes with it.
Short form content has become incredibly popular with the rise of social media forms and has been adapted to many platforms such as Tiktok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook Reels. This has caused many of the younger generations to develop a relatively short attention span.
This attention span, along with the culture of the internet, creates very niche and specific jokes that are constantly adapting and being changed with the creativity of influencers. These niche jokes quickly evolve past what they originally were, becoming so disattached from the original, that it leaves those not in the loop extremely confused and unable to understand and needing an explanation on the slang and jokes that are so popular.
For example, the word rizz is short for the word charisma and is commonly used similarly to the word charisma to suggest that a person holds the ability to attract a person they are interested in.
The Tiktok rizz party stems from the word rizz and originates from a flier a person found in which it advertised a TikTok rizz party that would be held. The term TikTok rizz party was then applied to posted footage of a party held for a person’s birthday in which many high schoolers were dancing to music.
This is just one example of how the internet’s humor quickly evolves past its original meaning. The people or characters in the TikTok rizz party were quickly assigned names such as the group leader, white shirt kid, the duo, and Turkish Quandle Dingle. These characters were given stories and the characters and their behaviors were analyzed in detail.
The name Quandale Dingle itself is another example of brain rot, stemming from an edited picture of a man with an incredibly long nose. The fake character, Quandale Dingle, was given a story in which he told his incredibly complex story over footage of random things happening in order to deliver the quick and fast paced humor loved by Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
John Pork is similar to Quandale Dingle in that it was a picture of a man with an edited face to appear like a pig calling a cell phone with the text “would you answer?”
“Brain rot is really funny, but it gets old quickly. But it’s always changing, and stuff loses its interest after only a few days or a week,” said sophomore Madilynn Cassidy.
Brain rot is here to stay, it seems, as the popularity of short form media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s likely that brain rot and TikTok will be the next thing to cement itself and will become a standard type of content for people to consume.
