I recently read this article by Daysia Tolentino about “FictionalTok.” This is a side of TikTok where people act as, say, the assistant to a billionaire. They play it straight, mimicking the true kind of storytelling that goes on on the platform generally, so that it might not immediately be obvious that they’re just exercising their creativity. Commentators, Tolentino points out, often don’t appear to realise they’re watching something fake.
This honestly isn’t something I’ve run into much (unless I have and I’m just falling for it???) but it reminded me of a separate but related thing. There’s a handful of TikTokers I’ve seen blow up for saying something outlandish, and then coasting on the engagement of commenters demanding proof.
There was one that kept passing my page a few months who said that she was “immortal” and had been alive since the 1800s. More recently a guy who constantly appeared to be up to his neck in water in his videos claimed that he lived full time in the middle of the ocean. (Honestly the camera work on this one was impressive regardless.)
By far the funniest example of this is this one that got reposted to Tumblr where OP claims that they could have survived a wildly destructive car crash. In the repost, one Tumblr user gets increasingly irate they couldn’t have, and second one is just winding them up by saying “they could tho.” (The comments on the original are pretty similar.)
I think this is peak comedy to me because saying something extremely confidently as engagement bait is like 15% of the internet by volume and it can be Extremely Bad. But this trend mirrors it completely, and is therefore Good.
Take your average smug Quote Tweet. OP says something transphobic, and one of your friends or colleagues triumphantly replies that they are, in fact, wrong. Their argument might be true, but you still just had to read transphobia, and the OP got engagement out of it. And that’s as far as it goes.
On the other hand, outlandish lies like “I could survive falling down a cliff in a Lamborghini” aren’t only benign but absurd. The whole argument is defanged from the start.
And then instead of providing only a weak punchline at best, the smug contradictory person becomes the joke. They feel like they’ve outsmarted the liar but are in fact falling directly into the trap that’s being set. It’s the perfect subversion. I could watch them all day.
I really do believe that person would have survived the crash, though.