Dark undertones lurk beneath popular 'Italian brainrot' memes

In the last couple of months, adults and children alike may have come across a series of social media sensations: a wooden oblong creature holding a baseball bat, a ballerina with a cappuccino for a head and a walking shark wearing blue Nike shoes.

- Gabrielle Marie Sunderaj

These surrealist internet memes first garnered views and "likes" in early 2025. Nonsensical and mildly grotesque, the characters generated by artificial intelligence (AI) instantly earned themselves a spot among social media's beloved "brainrot" genre.

Brainrot refers to content deemed to be of low quality or value, non-intellectual, trivial and addictive, and also refers to the supposed negative psychological and cognitive effects caused by it.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur (the wooden oblong object), Ballerina Cappuccina (the ballerina), Tralalero Tralala (the walking shark) and Bombardino Crocodilo (a crocodile head with a bomber plane body) are part of the cast. They all have pseudo-Italian names and their clips are voiced over in Italian.

One video of Tung Tung Tung Sahur doing a famous TikTok dance that was posted on April 27 received 26 million likes.