When one of Tim\u2019s year 8 pupils asked him about his \u201cfavourite Italian brain rot animal\u201d, he thought he\u2019d misheard. \u201cMy hearing is not great at the best of times \u2013 I had to ask her to repeat this probably four or five times,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Tim (not his real name) was familiar with the term \u201cbrain rot\u201d, used to describe the sense of mental decline after too much time spent mindlessly scrolling online (and voted Oxford University Press\u2019s word of the year<\/a> for 2024). But what was this about it being Italian?<\/p>\n He told his pupil to get on with her work, sat down at his laptop \u2013 and immediately turned to Google.<\/p>\n \u201cItalian brain rot\u201d, he discovered, refers to a series of absurdist animal characters, generated by artificial intelligence. They have ridiculous Italian-sounding names (like Bombombini Gusini and Trippi Troppi), and typically appear in videos on TikTok accompanied by fast-paced, AI-generated and Italian-ish (though also nonsensical) narration.<\/p>\n It is, in short, a meme beloved by the emerging generation Alpha (born from 2010 to 2025) and the youngest members of gen Z (generally those born from 1997 to 2012). And if you are any older \u2013 even if you fancy yourself as highly online, or a meme connoisseur \u2013 it is all but certain to make very little sense to you, as Tim found out at his laptop.<\/p>\n He shares his discoveries, sounding trepidatious. \u201cSo there\u2019s Chimpanzini Bananini<\/a>, which is a chimpanzee fused with a banana. Bombardiro Crocodilo<\/a>, which is a crocodile fused with a bomber plane. There\u2019s one who\u2019s just a cappuccino with legs \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Ballerina Cappuccina. Illustration: TikTok\/@aironic.fun<\/p>\n That\u2019s Ballerina Cappuccina<\/a>: a female ballet dancer spliced with a cup of coffee, often depicted as being in a relationship with Cappuccino Assassino<\/a> (you can figure it out).<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s history \u2013 lore \u2013 behind all these animals,\u201d continues Tim wonderingly. \u201cLike, some of them are at war with each other. And there are songs about them.\u201d<\/p>\n And children in his class are into it on a scale he has not previously seen with a trend or meme. \u201cAs soon as it\u2019s mentioned by one person, the entire class starts talking about it,\u201d he says. \u201cThey are obsessively focused on Italian brain rot.\u201d<\/p>\n If, reading this, you can feel your own brain decaying, that\u2019s understandable. Really, if you were born in a year that starts with the figure 1, \u201cItalian brain rot\u201d is not for you.<\/p>\n Yet its massive popularity with young people is worth at least attempting to wrap your head around as an indicator of the direction of travel of online culture.<\/p>\n Tralalero Tralala. Illustration: TikTok<\/p>\n The first character to take off was a shark sporting Nike sneakers (three, one for each fin), called Tralalero Tralala<\/a>. The audio \u2013 of a man\u2019s voice, speaking garbled Italian \u2013 surfaced first, on TikTok in early January, before being paired with the AI-generated image a few days later.<\/p>\n More characters swiftly followed, spreading across TikTok. Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of the site Know Your Meme, namechecks Brr Brr Patapim<\/a>, \u201ca proboscis monkey that is also a tree\u201d, as one who made it to YouTube.<\/p>\n Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Illustration: TikTok\/@noxaasht<\/p>\n There is also Indonesian brain rot, notably Tung Tung Tung Sahur<\/a> (\u201cwhich is like a stick figure with a bat, telling people to wake up for a meal during Ramadan\u201d) and Boneca Ambalabu<\/a> (\u201ca frog with a tyre for a body, and human legs\u201d).<\/p>\n Both are accompanied by an AI-generated voice speaking Indonesian that, like their Italian counterparts, seeks to confuse rather than convey meaning.<\/p>\n \u201cThe audio is at least as important, if not more important than the imagery,\u201d says Caldwell. \u201cThey\u2019ll be doing it really over-the-top, like \u2018Tra-la-lero! Tra-la-lala!\u2019 \u2013 it really goes for the whole Italian sound.\u201d<\/p>\n Is it offensive to Italians? \u201cIt seems Italians have been all over this,\u201d Caldwell says, \u201cso I don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, the appeal of Italian (and Indonesian) brain rot is not that it\u2019s offensive, or even subversive \u2013 but that it\u2019s so silly.<\/p>\n After 15 years at Know Your Meme, Caldwell admits he doesn\u2019t connect with all the online ephemera that crosses his desk \u2013 \u201cbut I really like this one,\u201d he says. \u201cThe dumber the meme, the better, in my opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n Bombardiro Crocodilo. Illustration: TikTok\/@armenjiharhanyan<\/p>\n The ease and speed with which these videos can be produced on accessible tools such as ChatGPT has helped with the meme\u2019s spread. You can prompt the AI to visualise Bombardiro Crocodilo (just for example!) in a setting or scenario of your choice, or come up with a new character in that Italian brain rot style. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to have tons of video editing ability, or even to use your own voice,\u201d says Caldwell.<\/p>\n For adults tired or even afraid of the rapid advance of AI, Italian brain rot may be almost reassuring in its banality. \u201cThis is a non-threatening use of AI, not one that induces feelings of either doom or being replaced.\u201d<\/p>\n For young people, of course, it\u2019s not that deep. They are spending more time online now than in past generations, and from younger ages, with the result that they are influencing digital culture. \u201cNow you have children who are super-online,\u201d says Caldwell, \u201craised by iPads and on TikTok all the time, creating content, determining what are the biggest cultural phenomena of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n The last evidence of this, before Italian brain rot, was skibidi toilet<\/a>: a similarly witless meme that spread from YouTube in 2023 to spark a sensation among the youngest members of gen Z. If you somehow missed it, it features (to quote from Know Your Meme) \u201can army of sentient toilets with men\u2019s heads coming out of them, fighting for dominance against a bunch of men in suits with cameras for heads, and each video is gaining tens of millions of views\u201d.<\/p>\n Tim remembers that washing up in his classroom, too. \u201cThe kids love it so much, the word \u2018skibidi\u2019 is now part of gen Z and gen Alpha vernacular.\u201d<\/p>\n Its meaning, however, is far from straightforward, and steeped in ambiguous irony. \u201cIt can mean something good, something bad, something weird \u2026 If they call something \u2018skibidi\u2019, it\u2019s both a good thing and they\u2019re laughing at it the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n Taken together, skibidi toilet and Italian brain rot gleefully defy explanation, titillating young minds with their surrealist imagery and crude-seeming humour \u2013 and catch adults short in their feeble efforts at understanding.<\/p>\n Shrimp Jesus.<\/p>\n \u201cAI art\u201d is no longer solely for fooling older people primarily active on Facebook, Caldwell says, giving the example of Shrimp Jesus<\/a> (look it up). It is developing its own shorthand, conventions and sense that will inevitably \u2013 increasingly \u2013 go over many of our heads.<\/p>\n It\u2019s tempting to say that memes were better in the old days. Look at the inventiveness of templates such as Distracted Boyfriend<\/a>, the layered visual jokes, the endless possibilities for meaning-making. But Caldwell \u2013 himself a millennial \u2013 is more sanguine, suggesting that Italian brain rot is just another evolution of human creativity. \u201cThe AI is making the image, there\u2019s a text-to-speech voice, but the joke itself is being invented by an actual person behind a computer.\u201d<\/p>\n Tim is not so sure. He\u2019s noticed, when he sets his class creative writing assignments or another imaginative task, that they leap to their favourite Italian brain rot creature. \u201cI think the AI generation is not having those moments of sitting down and letting their imagination run wild, because AI does it all for them \u2013 all they have to do is use ChatGPT,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ll say: \u2018This has to be completely our own; I don\u2019t want any Chimpanzini Bananini.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But he has also started using the class\u2019s enthusiasm for Italian brain rot to engage them in lessons. In multiple-choice quizzes, every now and again, one of the four possible answers will be Tung Tung Tung Sahur, Tim says \u2013 \u201cjust to try and grab their attention\u201d.<\/p>\n He also now has an answer to that year 8 pupil\u2019s question. \u201cMy favourite is Blueberrinni Octopussini<\/a>,\u201d he says, \u201cwhich is an octopus fused with a blueberry.\u201d<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n