The Post-Post-Ironic TikTok Meme That Haunts My Waking Hours
A party so rizzed up, it became legend.
Stonehenge. The Mona Lisa. Ben Platt’s wig in the Dear Evan Hansen movie. This month, an enigmatic new work of cultural and artistic resonance joined their esteemed ranks:
The TikTok Rizz Party.
A few weeks ago, my algorithm merged with the TikTok Rizz Party by way of a topic that—I admit with some shame—crosses my feed a lot: Hamilton. In this case, an AI-generated voice sang the song “Aaron Burr, Sir” with new lyrics, filling it with as many post-ironic Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang terms that it could possibly muster.
You know the type: slang that has likely never been used with any ounce of sincerity and exists solely to evolve into newer and wilder memes that confuse adults (except the ones who can’t get offline), only to become a story on local news two years after everyone’s stopped using it. Depending on your level of online-ness, you may or may not be familiar with some of these words, like skibidi or sigma or looksmaxing (if none of those rang a bell, congrats on having more than one brain cell).
Go ahead and watch it if you want, at your own risk. (Sorry if any of the lyrics are offensive—I genuinely don’t know what some of those words mean!)
Even though half of the video’s references flew over my head on first watch, the context clues certainly painted a picture. I gave the TikTok a heart as a thank you for the lol, as one does, and moved along.
But then it began. More videos referencing “Group Leader.” Captions talking about some TikTok Rizz Party. And the most confounding string of language of all: Turkish Quandale Dingle (we’ll come back to him). Almost completely removed from their original context, I scrolled past, not daring to dive into the bottomless well of lore that surely awaited me should I choose to look deeper.
But no matter how much I scrolled, Rizz Party videos kept appearing on my feed. And no matter how many of them I actually stopped to watch, I never got a firm grasp on what the fuck was actually happening. What is a Turkish Quandale Dingle? Does everyone on the internet know what this is but me? A 6th-Grade feeling washed over me. I was back at the school lunch tables with a red hot face, the only person in my class who didn’t know what a dingleberry was. (Please don’t Google that, Mom and Dad.)
Perhaps the time had come to accept it: I was getting too old to participate in the internet’s inside jokes.
After being plagued by the meme and these thoughts for weeks, I finally grabbed my LaToya Jackson magnifying glass and become the researcher I once was, meaning I clicked on the suggested search: “TikTok Rizz Party explained.”
Here’s the TLDR:
December 2023. A photo is uploaded on the internet with a photo of a flyer that was allegedly left on someone’s car. The flyer advertised a so-called “TikTok Rizz Party”.
The image goes viral across social media.
March 2024. Local Long Island entertainment company films teens on the dance floor at a Sweet 16 and posts the video on TikTok.
Video goes viral for the same reason they always do: God willed it.
Commenters all make the same joke that the Sweet 16 party is actually the TikTok Rizz Party from the aforementioned meme.
April 2024: TikTok Users begin creating their own content about what is now the definitive TikTok Rizz Party, making conspiratorial videos featuring AI-generated voices that intellectualize over the group dynamics of the young men dancing in the footage. These fictional video essays break down the original video practically frame by frame, dissecting and analyzing the group hierarchy within an inch of its life (Who’s the group leader? Who’s the beta? etc.).
The videos spiral and take on a life of their own, as more and more ancillary content gets created by (often anonymous) users who build mythology around the teens, which then gets adopted as “lore” by more users, who create more content… and so on and so forth.
Once you’re on Rizz Party TikTok, there’s no way out. Every time you log on, a new theory, character, or video angle emerges. There’s Red Dress Girl. The Outcast. Tomato Boy. And then there’s Turkish Quandale Dingle, a teen with a particularly memorable dance solo in the middle of the original video, who has become a main character in TikTok Rizz Party lore.
But who exactly IS Quandale Dingle? What makes him Turkish? And should I be scared?
Thanks to the incredible people at Know Your Meme, I’m able to give you a quick rundown:
“Quandale Dingle is the name of a Pennsauken high school football player featured in a series of goofy ahh shitpost memes based on a viral screenshot of a PC login screen for a man with the name.”
Basically, there’s this grainy, edited image of a rapper named YoungBoy NBA who some people on the internet refer to as Quandale Dingle, because of a completely DIFFERENT meme from a whole ass other time, and those two memes merged, so now the man in the image below is known as Quandale Dingle. You don’t need to know anything else, I promise. It’s a photo of a rapper with a distorted nose. And I guess TikTok users think that Turkish Quandale Dingle looks like this guy, but Turkish? Okidoke.
This is brain rot content at its core. Iterations on an iteration on an iteration on a meme that was already so niche to begin with, that it’s not even worth trying to explain to people who don’t get it. (And yet…)
At this point you may be wondering, “Hey, is this bullying?” I like where your head is at. It probably did feel like bullying somewhere along the way, likely early on. But you can rest easy tonight knowing that the teens featured in this video have embraced their newfound internet fame and even their nicknames, whatever the intent behind them was originally. Which is great, because technically these teens were doxxed by TikTok users who found their real names (yikes), high school (double yikes) and personal TikTok accounts (eek) in the flurry of Rizz Party-centric content creation that continues to this day.
Though they are no longer able to appear on the Ellen Degeneres Show—as would have been their right 8 years ago—there’s still hope. On the bright-aka-bleakly-capitalist side, these teens can now make money not just from their TikToks, but through a variety of revenue streams like selling Cameos for $75 a pop…
Or even a LITERAL PARTNERSHIP WITH MARC JACOBS for Blue Tie (aka Group Leader) and TQD (colloquially), which stands at almost 5 million views on the platform. While they’re getting their bag, they’re also owning the narrative, appearing on podcasts and livestreams to explain their side of the story and making content for their personal pages, which are probably monetized now that they have hundreds of thousands of followers. Good for them!!
Who knows? By this time next month, the Rizz Party boys could be getting a Presidential Medal of Honor from pRIZZident Biden himself (a peacemaking gesture after he bans the platform for good). Anything is possible. All I know is that I have now passed the TikTok Rizz Party curse on to you. I can finally be free. Good luck.