Italian brainrot

• 1. Introduction

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  Italian brainrot is a run of internet memes from early 2025 that features a ballerina in a tutu whose head is a cappuccino mug. She is one of many AI-generated creatures with pseudo-Italian names. Others are stranger still, and all of them spread fast across TikTok and Instagram. The images are sloppy on purpose, the voices are synthesized, and the stories barely make sense. Yet the trend reached newsstands, toy shelves and even a government meeting. How did a nonsense rhyme turn into a global fixation? What exactly are these creatures, and why do some people find the whole thing funny while others find it troubling?

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• 2. Origin

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  In October 2023, internet users made a batch of memes in which the American actor and wrestler Dwayne Johnson rhymes about absurd subjects. In one clip he blurts the nonsense phrase "Tralalero tralala". He later pairs it with "smerdo pure nell'aldilà", a crude Italian line about the afterlife. That phrase became the seed of Italian brainrot.

  Nobody can say for certain where the trend truly began. Most accounts, though, treat the character Tralalero Tralala as the first example. The TikTok user @eZburger401 is often credited with creating it, and reportedly posted a video of the character in January 2025. The account was banned soon afterward. Possibly the profanity in the audio was the reason.

  The sound lived on without its creator. Another user, @elchino1246, reused the audio over an image of a shark blended with a pigeon. Then, on the 13th of January 2025, the user @amoamimandy.1a posted an AI-generated picture of a shark wearing shoes. That post has since been deleted, but it collected 7 million views first.

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• 3. Anatomy of a Meme

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  Generative artificial intelligence produces nearly every image and video in this genre. The recurring formula is the hybrid, which fuses an animal with an everyday object, a food or a weapon. Names follow a pattern too. Many carry Italian-sounding endings such as -ino or -ello, and others lean on stereotypical Italian cultural markers. Over the pictures runs an AI-generated Italian voice, which often says nothing coherent at all.

  Fans did not stop at single clips. They began writing stories around the creatures, and the genre has been described as a kind of internet folklore. Narration is delivered with wildly dramatic emphasis, and each retelling tends to be more exaggerated than the last. The creatures themselves are casually referred to as "animals", even when one is a bomber or a cup.

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• 4. The Cast

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  The first character to go viral was the three-"legged" shark in Nike sneakers. In the lore he is an athlete who can run at superhuman speed and leap very high.

  Tung Tung Tung Sahur breaks the Italian pattern entirely. This wooden log with a wooden bat comes from Indonesia. His name imitates the sound of the kentungan, a slit drum that Indonesians traditionally beat to wake people for sahur, the pre-dawn meal Muslims eat before fasting in Ramadan. In Sundanese, a language spoken in Indonesia, tung also means "rumbling". The user @noxaasht made the character in February 2025, and he later grew into a meme apart from Italian brainrot.

  Then there is the crocodile-headed creature with the body of a World War II-era twin-prop bomber. His brother is a goose with fighter jet wings, called Bombombini Gusini.

  The ballerina's backstory runs like a soap opera. Her tutu and pointe shoes are the costume, and her sister is named Espressona Signora. In one telling she was married to a ninja until she cheated on him.

  The roster also includes a banana-bodied chimpanzee, billed as indestructible and counted among the genre's main characters, plus a bipedal cactus-elephant in sandals. A cat with a shrimp's body is another regular. Some videos reuse that name for an obese bear with a fish's head, nicknamed the "King of the Sea".

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• 5. Brain Rot

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  In 2024, Oxford University Press picked "brain rot" as its Word of the Year. The term describes the damage to a person's mental state from overconsuming "trivial or unchallenging content" online. It can also name the material itself.

  Viewers of this genre use the label with a wink. By calling it brainrot, they admit how ridiculous the clips are. The same word also acknowledges a larger worry, which is the growing flood of AI slop online.

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• 6. Reception

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  Polish radio channel Polskie Radio explained the trend's appeal to Generation Alpha in plain terms. The meme is popular "because it's stupid, funny, and veeeery addictive". The station also pointed to its spread into Roblox games, music remixes and quizzes.

  Its notoriety reached the United States, South Korea and Germany. Various brands copied the style for their own social media marketing.

  Commentators were less united. Radio France Internationale called the pseudo-Italian naming "a bit problematic". The German daily Die Tageszeitung praised a "creative approach to technology, language, and pop culture". China's Legal Daily compared the meme's pull on young children there to Elsagate, the earlier scandal over strange videos aimed at kids.

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• 7. Controversial Audio

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  The original Tralalero Tralala audio contains blasphemy against God, and some Muslim TikTok users spoke out against the trend for that reason. Others replied that Italian speakers often use blasphemy as a casual filler word. By that reading, nobody intended anything anti-religious or Islamophobic.

  A sharper objection targets Bombardiro Crocodilo. Some videos use Italian narration that describes him as someone flying bombing raids in Palestine, and the lyrics speak of bombing civilians in Gaza. Critics said this makes light of the Gaza genocide. They worry it normalizes casual cruelty and dulls viewers to real suffering.

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• 8. From Meme to Merchandise

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  By March 2025, the meme had spawned a cryptocurrency. A volatile coin called "Italianrot" launched that month, and other meme coins followed. The characters' likenesses were also used to sell toys and non-fungible tokens. They became the centerpiece of the popular Roblox game Steal a Brainrot.

  In Italy, several newsstands began selling Skifidol Italian Brainrot Trading Card Games, aimed at a younger crowd. The release brought a noticeable jump in Generation Alpha customers. The magazine L'Espresso likened that rush to the Italian debut of Garbage Pail Kids cards. In 2025 Panini followed with a sticker album.

  Politics took notice as well. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán released a TikTok video in which a 3D model of Tung Tung Tung Sahur dances during a government meeting.

  The biggest platform arrived in April 2026, when Fortnite Battle Royale added skins of Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Ballerina Cappuccina. Players complained beforehand that the characters came from AI-generated media. Ballerina Cappuccina went on to become the lowest-rated skin in the game.

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