Social media trend: hyper-ironic slipping on the banana

Oh, there's Elmo: as a hand puppet. Two guys go to McDonald's with Sesame Street puppets, change their voices and sound nothing like Elmo and Co. The same guys sing the intro to the sitcom "Two and a Half Man." Then: A mafia film that doesn't seem like a parody, but rather as if it had been produced by a few 12-year-olds in a school film club. This is followed by: self-love content, business tips, a Manosphere podcast excerpt: “Women stand in front of the Louis Vuitton store; not to buy a bag, but to be approached by a man.” It's a fever dream. There's even a video of someone slipping on a banana.

I'm chilling on my cell phone and got stuck on the accounts of @handychillen and @flaschko5. They are responsible for all the videos, bombing Instagram and Tiktok full of short sketches and reenactments. The content of the two Austrians and their circle of friends is so overloaded and has such a strong pull that I want to stay online forever. Because it is completely unclear what happens next.

No pop culture reference is safe, no scene, no digital rat hole. The internationally known musician Sofie Royer jumps around, Arafat Abou-Chaker's cousin, Ski Aggu, the most insignificant niche rapper Aachen Demon. Everyone is there, everything is pop. There are even shirts with Handychillen prints including a promotional video in which the two of them dance ballet. Why is this all so much fun?

These videos tap into an online humor that's different than what people like El Hotzo became known for a few years earlier. The videos by @handychillen and @flaschko5 are neither moralizing nor cynical and they are not ironic either. This isn't about winking or pointing fingers. So when Manosphere podcasts are re-enacted, it's on par with the Elmo hand puppet at McDonald's and slipping on the banana.

There is no classification, no visible attitude. But that's exactly what makes these videos, gags or not, so powerful. They work according to the old Spiegel motto “Say what is”. What the two of them pick up and expose layer by layer is already there, everything is available, all the misogynistic shit. When these two boyish anti-bros reenact it, it becomes clear what abysses are actually opening up.

I have to think of the concept of hyperirony, developed by the writer Charlotte Krafft for artists like the rapper Moneyboy or the Frankfurter Hauptschule collective. So for people who always had the question: Are they serious? Hyperirony, writes Krafft, is an attitude that connects producers and recipients and opens up a new level of communication between the two.

And this hyperirony does not describe the object of art, but rather the possible inner attitude of the artist and the consumer towards the object. This also happens with @handychillen and @flaschko5, you just have to look in the comment columns. Everyone knows, everyone participates, everyone agrees to take what they see seriously.

They are part of the collective performance, know that humor is happening here, but act as if it were all completely normal, everyday life. Hyperirony is a mode in which the ego can take a vacation from itself, writes Charlotte Krafft, and she is right. I keep scrolling, giving myself a brain vacation, and only then realize how much some of these videos stimulate critical thinking.