By: Evie Richards
Whenever people ask what is wrong with me my go to answer is that I had unrestricted access to the internet growing up. Starting around middle school I found myself immersed in internet culture - tumblr, vine (rest in peace), youtube, and of course all the usual places someone between the ages of 11-15 would go to get groomed (omegle, kik, etc, etc, good riddance to them all). To this day I remain chronically online in a very Cool and Down to Earth way, but in recent months I’ve realized something strange: WHAT THE FUCK IS A SKIBIDI TOILET AND WHY IS IT FANUM TAX?? As I’ve said, I’ve been on top of internet culture for many years now so why is it that on some random day while doing my favorite hobby (doom scrolling in my underwear) I came across something I had never seen before:
Sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler,
You’re so skibidi,
You’re so fanum tax,
I just wanna be your sigma,
Freaking come here,
Give me your Ohio…
What is this? Is it real? After much research (tapping the little search thing at the bottom of the tiktok) I came to find out that this is Gen Alpha Humor.
Gen Alpha is the generation following Gen Z. Gen Alpha includes anyone born between the years 2010 and 2025. Now this age range may sound young, but much to my dismay I found out that kids born in 2010 turn 14 this year??? When did this happen? Who allowed such a thing to happen in the first place? Whether we Gen Zers like it or not, Gen Alpha humor is here to stay, unfortunately. Now you may be asking yourself, “Evie? What could a bunch of sticky handed, cocomelon, pandemic babies raised by millennials possibly contribute to the world of comedy?” And to that I say, nothing good. Okay, maybe calling the humor of 6-14 year olds “bad” and “lowbrow” as a full grown adult is a bit much, maybe we just don’t understand it. This is why I have taken it upon myself, Dear Reader, to do the impossible (super easy and very Googlable) task of trying to understand Gen Alpha humor.
If I wanted to understand, I needed to fully immerse myself in the Gen Alpha meme zeitgeist, and what better way to do that than interviewing an actual Gen Alpha kid? Ok so this actually proved to be harder than I thought since I don’t really have any siblings or cousins in this age range. I asked friends if I could borrow their younger Gen Alpha aged siblings for an interview for my article in a female run art school comedy magazine, but unfortunately they all declined stating it was “weird” and “no my 13 year old brother doesn’t want to “chill” with you.” I refused to give up and betray the beacon of journalistic integrity that is Boobees Magazine. I soldiered on in my dogged attempt to understand what a skibidi toilet was and I did the only thing that was left to do: Just sorta look up “gen alpha humor explained” in the tiktok search bar and see what comes up…perfect.
I spent hours watching videos of middle schoolers- wait, no, that sounds bad- I spent hours immersing myself in Gen Alpha culture. I scrolled through video after video of nonsense content that made the whole Gen Alpha not being able to read thing make sense to me. But I was able to eventually find my saving grace. A video from Tiktok user, Nicole Pellegrino, shows her talking with the girls she babysits about Gen Alpha slang. These two Lululemon clad tweens who no doubt would have bullied me into an eating disorder if I was still in middle school, explain to her, in a rather condescending way, that Gen Z words like “slay” and “bet” are out. This absolutely floored me. As a chronic slay sayer this is the worst news I could ever hear. As the video continues on they explain to her that “GYATT” is actually an acronym (derived from AAVE) that stands for “Girl Your Ass Thick”. They went on to explain other words like “Preppy” or “Vanilla Girl” but this was more Gen Alpha concepts and ideas than it was actual humor. I decided to leave Tiktok and look around online so I googled “sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler song lyrics meaning” (which I am rather embarrassed to have in my search history) and ended up finding an entire fucking Wikipedia article dedicated to it.
The article really helped me put together the pieces on this one part of the vast and rapidly expanding world of Gen Alpha humor. I have provided below a glossary for beginning to understand Gen Alpha slang and humor.
GYATT - As previously established, “gyatt” is an acronym referring to someones ass and it stands for “Girl Your Ass Thick”.
Examples of uses - “Look at that gyatt!” or the alternative which I admit has grown on me, “You have gyatt to be kidding me!”
Skibidi Toilet - I honestly still could not figure out what the point of this was but basically it’s a series of videos about toilet heads having a war? Idk I wasn’t raised on Youtube kids and am also fully literate so it’s just not for me.
Examples of uses - I honest to God would not know how anyone would possibly bring this up in day to day conversation.
Rizzler - we know this one already.
Fanum Tax - This meme was popularized by fans of a Twitch streamer named Fanum who “taxes” people when he takes their food.
Examples of uses - If I ever heard anyone say this in real life I would stop speaking to them.
This covers what I believe are the most confusing of Gen Alpha slang terms. But what does all this mean for us members of Gen Z? I mean, it feels like one day we go online and the world is our oyster. The next day I am googling what a GYAT is while on break at my job. I truly believe that this is just the first wind of Gen Z experiencing generational turnover. But where do we go from here? Are we forced to live out the same fate as our millennial forefathers? I think what makes millennials so embarrassing is that when Gen Z came along with our own humor and style and ways of doing things they decided to hold onto side parts and skinny jeans and words like “smol” and “doggo” with an iron grip and took fortress against the outside world in their homes with fugly interior design. We as Gen Z need to be different. We need to realize and accept that we are growing older (the oldest member of Gen Z is around 28) and that the younger people are going to bring in their own humor and style and what have you. Most importantly, if we do not want to turn out like millennials we need to eventually let our specifically Gen Z idiosyncrasies die out because I refuse to be 33 with a house and a family getting clowned online by 15 year olds cause we couldn’t stop saying slay. All this being said, I’m going to keep saying slay for as long as I can. Ok slay, article over.
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