Twitter's favorite comedic TikToks range from deadpan humor to completely absurd.TikTok: flossybaby, Perry Goeders, Tanara Mallory.
- A Twitter user asked her followers what the funniest TikTok they'd ever seen was.
- The tweet blew up, receiving thousands of responses.
In its short life, TikTok has given us a lot of drama. Petty feuds, furious backlash, questionable trends, and congressional hearings are just some of the controversial aspects likely to draw headlines. So much so it's easy to forget that TikTok is also flooded with hilarious, creative, fun creators that bring us joyful content.
Having risen from the ashes of Vine, best known for introducing six-second sketch comedy to the online masses, the legacy of FunTok remains alive and well on the app. And one person made it their mission to remind us.
On June 1, an anonymous Twitter user who goes by "Mystery," fired off a six-word tweet that would dominate timelines for days. "What's the funniest tiktok video you've ever seen?" they wrote. Despite having a modest following of around 1,700, the tweet exploded in popularity, receiving around 15,000 replies and quote-tweets from people sharing some of the best comedic TikToks we've ever seen.
Here are eight of the best submissions we could find, ranked very scientifically according to how many O's would go in our "lol" responses.
8. Sylvanian Families dolls meets "Euphoria."
TikToker Thea von Engelbrechten received multiple mentions in the thread for her absurdly hilarious series which follows the outlandish imagined antics of a group of Sylvanian Families dolls that speak in internet slang, deal drugs disguised as baby formula, and buy their weapons on Depop ("omg, sustainable!") amid friendship drama set to the backdrop of throwback pop songs.
Engelbrechten told Bustle in February 2022 that she was using the series to spotlight some of the real issues facing young people in an exaggerated way. "It's just my way of coping to joke about it," she said. Her 2.3 million followers seem to agree.
7. An alien on Earth, in the trenches.
"My friend had suggested it, you know, we were picking a vacation spot and she was like, 'Let's go to Earth,' and I'm like, 'Earth?!'" says TikTok creator flossybaby, playing the part of an alien being interviewed about their experience visiting the human planet.
The mega-viral video, which received over 20 million views since it was posted in October 2020, was suggested by Twitter user @sapphosz. Aside from the absurdist nature of the alien filter, its sarcastic delivery which mimics that of people interviewed for news broadcasts clinches the comedic value.
"I promised myself I wasn't going to cry when I did this interview," the alien continues, tearing up. "But we get there and these people are disgusting. These are the nastiest people I've ever met, and I've been to Jupiter, Pluto, Mars... very fine people. But Earth? We were in the trenches."
An honorable mention goes to TikToker Kevin Ferguson, whose related video depicting his take on aliens gossiping about their time on Earth was also highlighted in the Twitter thread.
6. Bizarre FoodTok gets an upgrade.
For Twitter user @NomDeGuerre69, it's all about a TikTok creator called Tanara Mallory, whose reactions to the most bizarre recipes on the app combine sarcastic catchphrases ("Everyone's so creative!") and deadpan observational humor ("See how that looks? So... different? Almost like when we put it in!") to gently mock increasingly outlandish food videos.
"I'm just sarcastically saying what's on everyone's mind," Mallory told The Philadelphia Enquirer in an April interview.
According to the outlet, Mallory isn't exactly tech-savvy, but she's still managed to amass 3.5 million followers on the app with her comedic videos, which may be inspired by her day job as a supermarket production cook.
Mallory isn't dunking on home cooks sharing their recipes; the videos she mocks tend to seem designed to engender trolling, featuring "tips" like chopping onions without bothering to peel them, stuffing chicken with marshmallows and stapling it shut, and freezing sausages and beans to create a savory popsicle — just what you always wanted, as Mallory might say.
5. When your friend goes full influencer for no reason.
What's something that feels kind of normal until you see you see someone do it IRL?
For one TikToker's friend, it's the classic TikTok influencer moves, from filming in their car, to a peppy "hi, guys!" and claiming your followers have been asking for whatever content you're about to give them. In this case, the ultimate cliché: a morning routine.
A Twitter user who goes by @EmmaTolkin resurfaced the mega-viral TikTok, which received over 15 million views since it was posted in November 2020 by a user known as Roquey.
The on-screen caption reads "pretending to be an influencer infront of my friend." The friend in question begins to laugh as soon as he announces into the camera that he's about to share his routine, saying through giggles, "What are you doing?"
The uncontrollable laughter and subsequent reactions from Roquey make the video the comedic gold that it is, while also reminding us of the absurdity of some aspects of influencer culture that we probably don't question enough.
4. "You think I own Ikea?"
Comedian Scott Seiss, also known as "Angry Ikea Guy" on TikTok, got a lot of love on the Twitter thread.
His viral TikTok series shows him posing as an Ikea employee, saying out loud what many customer services workers save for their after-work drinks rant about annoying shoppers.
Imagining a response to a customer saying they're going to tell all their friends not to shop there, he says, "Tell 'em. You think I want five other yous running around the store? Have them call me, I'll tell 'em. You think you hate this place more than me? I work here."
Seiss's videos, inspired by his time actually working at Ikea, have long struck a chord with viewers, helping him amass 1.7 million followers, land a role in the 2023 movie "Cocaine Bear, and tour his comedy show across the country. A true TikTok comedy inspiration.
3. If department stores were reality TV stars.
If you thought the Kardashians are a lot, wait until you see the mean-girls drama unfolding between popular kids Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's, wannabe Macy's, and lovable outcasts Dillard's and JCPenney — in the mind of TikToker Perry Goeders, at least.
Her TikTok, imagining what a reality show based around the personalities of department stores might look like, was suggested by a Twitter user who said they worked at one of the stores mentioned. In the comments of the original video, which was posted in June 2022, many said their experiences also chimed with the vibes given to each store.
Goeders has continued the story on too, posting multiple episodes in her department store series. You're welcome.
2. "Make them... a meteor."
What if the world's origins could be traced back to a cross-purposes conversation between God and an angel? That's the premise of Eliza Petersen's TikTok video from September 2020, which still lives rent-free in the mind of a Twitter user who goes by @svftwang, who tweeted that it will "always get me."
"Hey, angel, did you give the dinosaurs more muscle like I asked?" asks Petersen, playing "God" in the clip.
"What?" she responds as the angel.
"I told you to make them meatier?" says "God."
"Make them... a meteor," replies a horrified angel as the punchline.
After the video went viral, Petersen told BuzzFeed the joke goes back decades, but she was inspired to turn it into a TikTok sketch when she saw it resurface in a tweet.
As a keen amateur paleontologist, Petersen said the emotion displayed in her dramatic interpretation of the offending angel was real, although it ended up giving the clip even more comedic value.
"I think I'm around dinosaurs enough that I've grown this level of appreciation that most people don't have," Petersen told BuzzFeed. "I thought about how it would be so sad to obliterate the dinosaurs, and simply by accident too, so I started to tear up."
1. The horrors of 'is it cake?'
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when you couldn't scroll through social media for more than 30 seconds without seeing a weirdly disturbing video of someone cutting into an everyday object to reveal it was actually a realistic-looking cake.
Well before Netflix caught onto the appeal of the trend and turned it into a cutesy baking competition, social-media users began to report that they fount the trend unsettling, and it distorted their sense of reality. One TikTok user, who goes by "danbambam," turned his cake-induced trauma into comedy in a video highlighted by Twitter user @imsorryrumhammm.
The clip, overlaid with creepy, horror movie-esque music, shows the creator becoming increasingly distressed while watching on a screen as someone cuts into household objects including toilet paper and an onion, revealing them to be cake. As the music swells, the paranoia sets in, and the creator begins to suspect everything around him of being cake, eventually discovering that he himself is a baked good, and proceeding to eat himself.
The video combines dark humor and hyperbole with a level of relatable angst. A sense of unease when viewing the cake bait-and-switch videos isn't just comedy fodder, but also has some pretty deep psychological roots. As Pascal Wallisch, an NYU psychology professor who studies subjective reality told Insider's Julia Naftulin in 2020, the "Is It Cake?" of it all upsets our trust in our own perceptions.
The deeply meta humor displayed, along with the level of detail in the video's production value, earns this video a number one spot on our LOL scale.
