When one of Tim’s year 8 pupils asked him about his “favourite Italian brain rot animal”, he thought he’d misheard. “My hearing is not great at the best of times – I had to ask her to repeat this probably four or five times,” he says.
Tim (not his real name) was familiar with the term “brain rot”, used to describe the sense of mental decline after too much time spent mindlessly scrolling online (and votedOxford University Press’s word of the yearfor 2024). But what was this about it being Italian?
He told his pupil to get on with her work, sat down at his laptop – and immediately turned to Google.
“Italian brain rot”, 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.
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 – even if you fancy yourself as highly online, or a meme connoisseur – it is all but certain to make very little sense to you, as Tim found out at his laptop.
He shares his discoveries, sounding trepidatious. “So there’sChimpanzini Bananini, which is a chimpanzee fused with a banana.Bombardiro Crocodilo, which is a crocodile fused with a bomber plane. There’s one who’s just a cappuccino with legs …”
That’sBallerina Cappuccina: a female ballet dancer spliced with a cup of coffee, often depicted as being in a relationship withCappuccino Assassino(you can figure it out).
“There’s history – lore – behind all these animals,” continues Tim wonderingly. “Like, some of them are at war with each other. And there are songs about them.”
And children in his class are into it on a scale he has not previously seen with a trend or meme. “As soon as it’s mentioned by one person, the entire class starts talking about it,” he says. “They are obsessively focused on Italian brain rot.”
If, reading this, you can feel your own brain decaying, that’s understandable. Really, if you were born in a year that starts with the figure 1, “Italian brain rot” is not for you.
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.
The first character to take off was a shark sporting Nike sneakers (three, one for each fin), calledTralalero Tralala. The audio – of a man’s voice, speaking garbled Italian – surfaced first, on TikTok in early January, before being paired with the AI-generated image a few days later.
More characters swiftly followed, spreading across TikTok. Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of the site Know Your Meme, namechecksBrr Brr Patapim, “a proboscis monkey that is also a tree”, as one who made it to YouTube.
There is also Indonesian brain rot, notablyTung Tung Tung Sahur(“which is like a stick figure with a bat, telling people to wake up for a meal during Ramadan”) andBoneca Ambalabu(“a frog with a tyre for a body, and human legs”).
Both are accompanied by an AI-generated voice speaking Indonesian that, like their Italian counterparts, seeks to confuse rather than convey meaning.
“The audio is at least as important, if not more important than the imagery,” says Caldwell. “They’ll be doing it really over-the-top, like ‘Tra-la-lero! Tra-la-lala!’ – it really goes for the whole Italian sound.”
Is it offensive to Italians? “It seems Italians have been all over this,” Caldwell says, “so I don’t think so.”
Indeed, the appeal of Italian (and Indonesian) brain rot is not that it’s offensive, or even subversive – but that it’s so silly.
After 15 years at Know Your Meme, Caldwell admits he doesn’t connect with all the online ephemera that crosses his desk – “but I really like this one,” he says. “The dumber the meme, the better, in my opinion.”
The ease and speed with which these videos can be produced on accessible tools such as ChatGPT has helped with the meme’s 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. “You don’t need to have tons of video editing ability, or even to use your own voice,” says Caldwell.
For adults tired or even afraid of the rapid advance of AI, Italian brain rot may be almost reassuring in its banality. “This is a non-threatening use of AI, not one that induces feelings of either doom or being replaced.”
For young people, of course, it’s 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. “Now you have children who are super-online,” says Caldwell, “raised by iPads and on TikTok all the time, creating content, determining what are the biggest cultural phenomena of the time.”
The last evidence of this, before Italian brain rot, wasskibidi toilet: 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) “an army of sentient toilets with men’s 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”.
Tim remembers that washing up in his classroom, too. “The kids love it so much, the word ‘skibidi’ is now part of gen Z and gen Alpha vernacular.”
Its meaning, however, is far from straightforward, and steeped in ambiguous irony. “It can mean something good, something bad, something weird … If they call something ‘skibidi’, it’s both a good thing and they’re laughing at it the same time.”
Taken together, skibidi toilet and Italian brain rot gleefully defy explanation, titillating young minds with their surrealist imagery and crude-seeming humour – and catch adults short in their feeble efforts at understanding.
“AI art” is no longer solely for fooling older people primarily active on Facebook, Caldwell says, givingthe example of Shrimp Jesus(look it up). It is developing its own shorthand, conventions and sense that will inevitably – increasingly – go over many of our heads.
It’s tempting to say that memes were better in the old days. Look at the inventiveness of templates such asDistracted Boyfriend, the layered visual jokes, the endless possibilities for meaning-making. But Caldwell – himself a millennial – is more sanguine, suggesting that Italian brain rot is just another evolution of human creativity. “The AI is making the image, there’s a text-to-speech voice, but the joke itself is being invented by an actual person behind a computer.”
Tim is not so sure. He’s noticed, when he sets his class creative writing assignments or another imaginative task, that they leap to their favourite Italian brain rot creature. “I 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 – all they have to do is use ChatGPT,” he says. “I’ll say, ‘This has to be completely our own; I don’t want any Chimpanzini Bananini’.”
But he has also started using the class’s 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 – “just to try and grab their attention”.
He also now has an answer to that year 8 pupil’s question. “My favourite isBlueberrinni Octopussini,” he says, “which is an octopus fused with a blueberry.”
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