An Elder Millennial's Guide to the History of Skibidi Toilet
If you only know Skibidi Toilet from sarcastic Millennial TikTokers, or the pox on late-night comedy that was Skibidi Biden, then you’re going to be confused every time you encounter a member of Gen Alpha for the rest of your life. But this animated series is one of the most-viewed pieces of art in human history — 15 billion views on TikTok and 65 billion views on YouTube — so it’s probably worth learning where the hell it came from.
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In a nutshell, it’s a surrealist riff on an entirely different meme, animated by a weirdo who had the wherewithal to continue the joke when it caught on unexpectedly. Buckle up for an M.C. Escher-ass series of rabbit holes that feel both disorienting and inevitable.
Biser King
It started innocently enough with a talented folk band that, to this day, isn’t big enough to warrant its own Wikipedia entry. If you peruse the “List of Bulgarian Pop-Folk Singers” and click on Biser King, it redirects to Skibidi Toilet. They surely didn’t expect to be the root of the world’s largest inside joke when they dropped their single “Dom Dom Yes Yes” on TikTok, and later YouTube, in 2022.
That’s right — the thing that inspired the thing that inspired one of the most popular things in history didn’t exist 2.5 years ago. Culture moves too fast, and I want off this ride.
The Original Trend
It’s important when discussing intergenerational friction to find common ground. And I think we can all agree that “Dom Dom Yes Yes” is a tip-to-tail bop. That wobbly hand saw noise makes me feel like a cartoon wolf uncontrollably dancing a complex jig I didn’t know I had in me. I will never willingly learn what the lyrics mean, because “schtip schtibidy dip” elicits an emotion too complex for the English language. It feels like my mouth has known those words for longer than I’ve been alive.
Especially if you watch the official music video, it’s no surprise that this song first went viral as a soundtrack to a much hornier trend. According to KnowYourMeme, the original trend that helped the song pop off was “women pulling their shirts over their heads, bouncing their breasts and putting glasses on their covered faces.”
YasinCengiz
@yasincengiz38
Despite countless bewbs bouncing to this banger, it would take a belly to help it achieve immortality. Turkish TikToker YasinCengiz brought a once-in-a generation confidence and mirth to the trend by wiggling and bouncing his considerable tummy with unmatched dexterity.
This wasn’t his first rodeo. He’d been celebrating his girth since at least March 2021, racking up around 10 million views. But when he combined his kingly belly with Biser King, in April 2022, YasinCengiz changed the trajectory of global pop culture.
As his views grew, so too did his influence — and his belly. He began collaborating with Turkish chefs, and he’s had his own successful influencing career parallel to Skibidi Toilet. But this ride has one more stop before we get there.
Paryss Bryanne
@paryssbryanne
Another TikToer, Paryss Bryanne, in turn, parodied this meme, complementing the energizing song with her signature style of jerky facial expressions and rapid camera movement. The creator of Skibidi Toilet cites her riff as one of his inspirations, which is extremely evident if you give her work a watch.
That finally brings us to…
Skibidi Toilet
Georgian animator (as in the country, not the state) Alexey Gerasimov, who posts as DaFuq!?Boom!, took Paryss Bryanne’s elastic-faced expressions and mapped them onto a fucked-up little 3D animated guy they lifted from Half-Life. Sorry for that whole sentence.
Nothing about Skibidi Toilet, from the structure to the “plot,” makes any sense, because it was probably never meant to be anything more than a 10-second shitpost. The first “episode” is a POV clip of someone stepping into an apartment bathroom, as a tiny businessman crosses their path, and seeing a creepy head come careening out of the toilet, singing a remix of this incredibly catchy song: “BRRRR skibidi dub dub dub yes yes.”
Gerasimov’s brilliance lies in how they’ve been able to heighten this 10-second goof into one of the most-watched epic tales in human history. The one-minute first “season” progresses from a single private toilet, to three urinals in an elevator, to a giant Skibidi Toilet infiltrating something like New York City, then finally a particularly ominous Skibidi Toilet entering an otherwise mundane restaurant scene, wordlessly implying some sort of hostile takeover.
Flash forward 23 seasons and 73 episodes, and the lore has grown to involve a global battle between heavily armed Skibidi Toilets of all sizes, CCTV cameras, speakers and television sets with James Bond-ass bodies and weapons, all potentially puppeteered by a Secret Agent and an almighty Scientist Toilet.
Honestly? It’s worth a watch! It’s the textbook definition of “epic,” and Gerasimov continues to do an expert job at heightening just enough to keep the attention of an entire generation.
Should more kids read classic literature like The Iliad and The Odyssey? Sure! But will they? If someone puts Odysseus in an attack toiletcopter and gives him laser eyes, yes, probably!
