Our video tonight is a compilation of the first 38 entries in the skibidi toilet series.

Skibidi. It’s been one of the biggest things in pop culture the last couple of years.

If you haven’t seen Skibidi, you might be wondering, “What the hell is that?”

If you have seen Skibidi, chances are you might still be wondering, “What the hell is that?”

Well, skibidi toilet (they do it all in lower case) is a series of many, many very short video clips created by Alexey Gerasimov, a self-taught animator living in post-Soviet Georgia. He created these clips using videogame design software and unlicensed music and the end result is clunky and charming while also being hilarious and deeply disturbing. He started posting these to his YouTube channel a little over three years ago, and they have captured the imagination of the under-twenty crowd.

Basically, toilets roll into odd situations, a human head pops out doing some scat rapping (literally and figuratively) and mayhem ensues. Over time in the series, humans with cameras and speakers for heads show up to do battle with them. Eventually, society collapses amid the warfare.

On the surface, it’s just a new internet meme, a “Hamster Dance” for a sufficiently devolved generation. The shock is when you watch them in bulk.

While Gerasimov is amusingly inept as an animator, it turns out that he is a master storyteller. When viewed together, skibidi toilet is a wild geopolitical thriller that manages, with little in the way of dialogue, to raise questions and make startling observations about our current surveillance society and the implications of individuals vs. groupthink and governments. This is far more coherent than you might expect, and when you watch them all together, it’s hard to turn away. There are genuinely effective jump scares and horrific images buried among the sheer absurdity of the premise.  And the political themes parodied within are scarily astute.

Seriously, the deep stuff is a more subtle allegory than Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but just as striking. What seems to be a goofy meme about heads popping out of toilets and singing is actually a very strong political work

Of course, it’s the toilets with heads popping out that made it such a huge phenomenon, with major merchandising and toy deals, and talk of a feature film.

But now, watch the clip above, and stick your head in the skibidi toilet. You might be surprised what you fish out.