Ballerina Cappuccina, Bombardiro Crocodilo, and Tralalero Tralala dancing on the beach.
Let me be clear: I don’t have children, so I also don’t have grandchildren to mediate the cultural confusion between myself and Generation Z. What I do have is a phone, a bit of curiosity, and a stubborn refusal to believe the world has entirely lost its mind — though after encountering something called Italian Brainrot, I’m no longer so sure.
I was born in the 1960s. Occasionally, I hear younger people speak about things like cassette tapes, typewriters, rotary phones, and fluorescent toys as if they were part of some surreal vintage wonderland. To me — and to most boomers I know — those things weren’t strange or ironic. They were just life. Ordinary. Functional. Familiar.
What does feel surreal is what I’ve recently stumbled across on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts — the natural habitats of today’s cultural experiments. That’s where I first encountered this bizarre phenomenon known as Italian Brainrot.
At first I thought it was some ironic meme about food culture, or maybe a YouTube parody. But no — it’s a genre in its own right. A stream of AI-generated videos, each under a minute, filled with manic, intentionally absurd characters screaming in bad Italian accents while doing the digital equivalent of banging pots and pans together.
There’s Tralalero Tralala — a sneaker-wearing shark-thing with the energy of an espresso-powered toddler.
There’s Bombardiro Crocodilo — a winged crocodile who seems to specialize in aerial pasta-related violence.
And Ballerina Cappuccina — a ballerina with a cappuccino cup for a head, who pirouettes like she’s auditioning for an opera written by a malfunctioning coffee machine.
The kids love it. They laugh uncontrollably. It’s not satire, exactly. And it’s definitely not parody in the way we understood it. It’s something stranger: a form of digital nonsense. It is content that functions as a coping mechanism for overstimulation, anxiety, or a fractured attention span — it is not a source of insight or meaning.
They call it brainrot. They mean that affectionately.
To me, it’s disorienting. I tried to approach it with some cultural generosity. Maybe it’s this generation’s version of Dadaism — a chaotic, comic response to a world that feels increasingly unfixable. In that light, it makes a certain kind of sense.
But I won’t lie: I still find it mostly annoying. Loud, repetitive, empty. Yet undeniably watchable — in the same way a snow globe full of glitter and frogs might be. I even caught myself laughing once or twice. Which annoyed me even more.
No, I won’t become a fan. I won’t follow Brr Brr Patapim or remix my own spaghetti-themed soundbite. But I see now that this isn’t just noise. It’s ritual. It’s play. It’s a strange and sometimes beautiful kind of escape.
And while I may not understand it, I remember the faces we made when our parents first heard punk. Or saw Monty Python. Or read Kurt Vonnegut.
These kids are strange.
But then again — weren’t we?