Chika Waga

Submission 731

About

Chika Waga, also known as Chikawaga, Shicawaga and Is This the First Meme of 2024?, refers to a comedy skit in which a young kid comments "Chika Waga" after observing his brother fall, introducing "the first meme of 2024." The clip, originally posted in January 2024, inspired parodies and ironic memes based on it over the following months.

Origin

On January 7th, 2024, the skit comedy YouTube^[1] channel BolingBros uploaded a YouTube short titled "The First Meme Of 2024!!!" The video starts with a young boy asking, "Is this the first meme of 2024???" with his brother falling down next to him and the boy commenting, "Chika waga!" two times. The boy's brother proceeds to repeat the phrase, with the third brother then joining in. The video (shown below) accumulated over 19 million views in six months.

Is this the first meme of 2024? Chika waga!

Spread

The video saw spread through reposts in the following weeks as it was shared to other sites and platforms. For example, on February 2nd, 2024, Redditor Sussy_Baka_1923 reposted it in the /r/lies^[2] subreddit, with the post accumulating over 3,300 upvotes in five months.

On May 2nd, an unknown Redditor posted the earliest found edit of the video in which it was combined with an earlier Bite the Curb sketch by BolingBros (original author of the edit unknown). The post received over 2,700 reposts in the /r/discordVideos^[3] subreddit in two months (shown below).

On June 28th, 2024, X^[4] user @0rbulus made another repost of the video that gained over 3,400 reposts and 33,000 likes in three days.

The video saw more ironic popularity in June 2024 as memes have been compared against "chika waga" to signify their poor quality (examples shown below).