Brain rot 2024: the best and funniest viral moments of the year | Australia news

“Brain rot” has been named Oxford’s word of the year, meaning “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging”.

But no matter how “trivial” or “unchallenging” the content may be, there’s still a lot to be learned about our culture through the trends, memes and storylines that dominated our social media feeds this year. So let’s embrace the brain rot and take a journey back through the 10 best and funniest viral trends that the internet had to offer in 2024.

Holding space for the lyrics of Defying Gravity

In the midst of an extremely emotional, tear-filled Wicked press tour, Tracy E Gilchrist, a journalist with Out magazine, tells the film’s stars, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, that “this week people have been taking the lyrics of Defying Gravity and holding space with that and really feeling power in that”.

Despite the stars later admitting that they didn’t fully understand what this meant, Erivo immediately wells up, quietly and sincerely stating, “I didn’t know that was happening … that’s really powerful.” A somewhat confused Grande gently grasps Erivo’s index finger in support.

The clip set the stage for a wave of collective catharsis, giving people the opportunity to gently mock both the borderline meaninglessness of certain online turns of phrase and the Wicked stars’ relentlessly earnest interview responses.

TikTok and Instagram were flooded with videos of people collectively “holding space” for the lyrics of Defying Gravity before meals, during work meetings and at movie theatres – a form of brain rot prayer. Even Gilchrist got in on the joke.

Plus, gripping someone’s finger to provide comfort is objectively hilarious.

Nara Smith’s cooking videos

Few people have managed to capture the internet’s attention like 23-year-old Nara Smith. The former model has repeatedly gone viral for her short cooking videos where she crafts common, yet ridiculously labour-intensive foods such as cornflakes, chewing gum and Coca-Cola from scratch – all while immaculately done up, donning increasingly extravagant outfits and narrating in a gentle whisper.

She’s now amassed 11.3 million followers on TikTok. But it’s not just the ridiculous nature of the videos that have people so enthralled – it’s the internet’s inability to tell if she is serious or not.

Smith’s idealised depiction of the perfect homemaker taps into the growing “trad wife” trend, where (usually rightwing) Christian female influencers make content romanticising traditional gender roles and encouraging other women to stay home. But is Nara Smith – who is herself Mormon – promoting this ideology or mocking it? Perhaps both? We may never know, and thus we can’t look away.

Plus, the idea of a toddler patiently waiting three hours for breakfast while their mum whips up cinnamon toast crunch from scratch is just objectively hilarious.

Brat summer and Kamala’s coconut tree

When the Democrats dropped then incumbent president, Joe Biden, from the 2024 ticket and replaced him with the then vice-president, Kamala Harris, people were nervous that all leftwing momentum would be lost. But then the biggest name in the music industry that month, Charli xcx, tweeted a simple sentence.

“Kamala is brat”, the British pop star said, referencing the title of her newly released album.

It might seem odd to suggest a 60-year-old former attorney general embodied the energy of a hyperpop, party music manifesto (which includes plenty of references to “bumping” lines of an unnamed substance) but given who she was replacing, Harris’s comparatively youthful and fresh-faced energy made this the perfect (slightly tongue-in-cheek) internet duo.

A viral clip of Harris talking about coconuts was quickly remixed into Charli xcx’s song 365, and social media – particularly TikTok – went wild. This internet trend sparked genuine excitement among young US voters, ushering in a wave of political optimism that hadn’t been seen for decades.

It was a uniquely 2024 moment – well, early 2024, anyway.

The Olympic meme factory

The Paris Olympics wasn’t just a brilliant display of the world’s most talented athletes; it was also an absolute goldmine for some of the funniest meme content of the year. Let’s have a look at the standouts.

There was the French pole vaulter who was tragically knocked out of the competition after he knocked the bar down in a particularly memorable way.

The Turkish shooter who rocked up with none of the special gear and an immense amount of charisma.

The men’s gymnastics team final, where the US team brought a man solely to sit around for two hours before casually performing the best pommel horse routine the world had ever seen.

And of course, Australia’s homegrown (anti?)hero, the breakdancer RayGun.

Baby animal royalty

As the cost-of-living crisis dragged on and anxieties over the US election grew, there were two brilliant rays of light that brought us joy in these troubling times: a tiny baby hippo and a giant baby penguin.

Queen Moo Deng!

And the true king of Australia, Pesto the Penguin.

Need we say more?

Hamilton x Hamilton

In February, one of the biggest sports stories of the year broke: seven-time Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton would be leaving the Mercedes garage in 2025 and donning the fabled red jumpsuit of Ferrari.

But F1’s newfound young, female fanbase quickly began to find parallels between Hamilton’s announcement and the famous rap songs from the musical of the same name.

Hundreds of videos set to the soundtrack of Hamilton the musical were posted, using clips from F1 broadcasts to make it appear as if the lyrics were directly narrating the career of Hamilton (the driver). They even cast Carlos Sainz, the driver who was sacked to make way for Hamilton, as the musical’s antagonist Arron Burr.

Essentially, the traditional masculine and staid world of motor sport was briefly overrun by theatre kids and it was glorious to watch.

‘Fully conscious’ Four Seasons Orlando baby

In June, a simple clip of a baby demonstrating a shocking amount of cognitive consciousness and fine motor skills won over the hearts of millions after she eloquently expressed her desire to visit the Four Seasons resort in Orlando, Florida.

People were entranced by baby Kate’s inexplicably hilarious little finger movement and the family appears to have got some sweet free accommodation after it went viral. A pleasant time all round.

Barron Trump likes his suitcase

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the US federal election, an old CNN clip resurfaced of his youngest child, Barron. The then elementary school-age boy joyously expresses his delight in his school suitcase (it’s actually a briefcase), his voice laced with a surprisingly strong Slovenian accent for someone born and raised in New York.

While this of course makes perfect sense (given that his mother, Melania, is Slovenian-American), people were still absolutely taken with the way young Barron said “sootcase” and it soon became an earworm that played on repeat in many people’s minds for weeks.

The rise of ‘hawk tuah’ girl

There’s no way around it: this list simply wouldn’t be complete without “hawk tuah”. Hayley Welch’s rise to fame came in the form of a 20-second clip taken from an otherwise unremarkable “man on the street” interview video posted by YouTubers Tim & Dee TV in June.

The hosts approach late-night revellers in Nashville, Tennessee, asking them: “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” Welch was one of the interviewees, and replied in a thick southern drawl: “Aw, you gotta give him that hawk tuah and spit on that thang – you get me?”

The delightful vulgarity of this newly coined onomatopoeia rocketed the clip into ultra-virality but most assumed Welch, a worker at a mattress spring company in Alabama, would quickly fade back into anonymity. Instead, she expertly leveraged her 15 seconds of fame, securing a lucrative merchandising deal, moving to LA and launching the “Talk Tuah” podcast.

The sheer absurdity and gall of it all has been enough to keep people watching, if only out of morbid curiosity. I mean, just how long can someone ride the wave of a single viral sentence?

To cap off this extreme “internet with a capital I” fable, Welch recently launched her own cryptocurrency, the “hawk coin”, which promptly lost 95% of its value within hours of release.

Cat brain rot

As this wrap-up comes to a close, it’s important to recognise that it’s not only humans that are victim to viral internet trends nowadays. And nothing demonstrates this better than “cat brain rot”. It’s just a low-resolution image of a cat spinning on a green screen, set to a catchy gibberish jingle, but something about it is absolutely entrancing to our feline friends.

Hundreds of videos have been posted showing cats either staring at the clip with wide-eyed fascination or watching with arched backs and bushy tails before attempting to attack the TV. Either way, they can’t look away.

Perhaps there’s some confirmation bias at play here – videos of the cats that don’t react never get posted – but even so, something in this video is captivating kitties around the world and thus well and truly earns it a spot on this brain rot list.