How Cartoon Sound Effects And Quandale Dingle Inspired The ‘Goofy Ahh’ Meme Genre

In recent years, TikTok has become something of a breeding ground for online slang. The platform has helped popularize and spread widely used slang terms like sheesh, unalive, and sussy baka and with all these terms have come countless memes and meme trends. One of the most recent terms to explode on the platform is goofy ahh, an AAVE spin on the term "goofy ass" that's become everyday lingo for many across the web. It's even spawned its own subgenre of memes thanks to the power of cartoon sound effects, absurd memes and a man named Quandale Dingle. Here's how it all happened.

Examples of people using the phrase "goofy ahh" date back as early as 2009 on Twitter, where it was almost exclusively used in a comedic, mocking way to point out “goofy ass” or ridiculous people, opinions and content. For years, goofy ahh was used like this in casual online conversation, mainly on Black Twitter, spreading across social media but never quite reaching the masses until 2021 thanks to the growing influence of TikTok and the platform’s increasing lean into absurd meme territory.

While it’s unclear what exactly sparked the explosion of the term “goofy ahh” as a regular part of online conversation, early uses of the term on TikTok (with the exact spelling “goofy ahh,” not “goofy ass,”) relate to cartoon sound effects. Some of the earliest viral videos to popularize the term are a series of “goofy ahh remixes” by TikToker and producer @proddadood, who was extremely influential in spreading the term. His videos remix popular songs with some of the most recognizable and undeniably goofy cartoon sound effects, such as spring noises, boings, horns and eating sound effects. These videos routinely gained hundreds of thousands and millions of views and inspired reactions across the web, including a reaction from music critic ImDontai where he cracks up at the remixes.

The earliest of @proddadood’s goofy ahh remixes was posted on September 28th, 2021 and features repeated footage of BBL Drake twisting his head while a slowed-down version of “Girls Like Girls” plays, slowed down cartoon sound effects sprinkled throughout. At the time, Drake the Type memes were peaking in popularity, this time portraying Drake himself as a stereotypical cartoon character and, ultimately, a bit of a softy. Memes portrayed him as the type of guy to snore like “honk shoo,” the type of guy to “float through the air when he smells pie” and the type of guy to say “Geronimo” when he jumps in the pool among countless other examples. Drake became an ultimate embodiment and example of a goofy ahh guy and while he didn’t directly inspire the popularity of the term, his memes helped define what it means to be a goofy ahh in tandem with the remixes themselves and the Quandale Dingle memes, which spread at the same time (and who we’ll talk about in greater detail shortly).

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“Goofy ahh” quickly became one of TikTok’s favorite phrases throughout the latter half of 2021 leading into 2022. The term can be found somewhere in just about any TikTok comment section and captioned on hundreds of videos that are even a little bit silly or goofy. If there’s a dog acting quirky in a video, that’s a “goofy ahh dog.” If someone makes a sound that’s just a little farfetched, that’s a “goofy ahh sound.” It became an all-encompassing term for calling out silly content online, eventually losing its original AAVE context and being adopted by Zoomers en-masse. This is perhaps best evidenced by skewed pronunciation of the word today, with many pronouncing it “goofy aw” rather than “goofy aa” as intended.

By the latter half of 2021, the “goofy ahh compilation” started to take over many corners of TikTok. The typical goofy ahh compilation video tends to come off as the creation of a mad-man, or in this case, an Internet-warped Zoomer whose done nothing but collect absurd content from the Internet their entire life and finally spewed it all out into a single video like an ape flinging its feces at the walls of its enclosure. In the past, these were known by the much less catchy title 21st century humor compilations, a genre punctuated by mashing together often low-quality Vines, shitposts, images and viral videos from across the web that have some unexplainable, cursed or random quality to them and adding as many bizarre sound and visual effects as possible to enhance the weirdness factor. The phrase “21st century humor” references the perceived bizarre turn that humor online took in the 21st century, leaning towards randomness and absurdity, anti-jokes and memes where the punchline isn’t exactly obvious, if it exists at all. Some good examples of this are memes like E and Lugowo, a song that was attached to many absurd meme compilations in 2021. What makes goofy ahh compilations different is the way they're presented, often coming at the viewer fast and furious with as many sped-up clips shoved into a short timespan as possible to overload the senses. They have a much larger focus on bizarre and abrasive sounds and less focus on additional visual effects, giving the videos a more raw feel. The videos defy any sort of punchline or comedic timing, instead getting laughs from being loud, random, obnoxious and offering viewers a new take on their favorite obscure cursed videos. Basically, they're like 21st century humor compilations on crack and with a little less effort in the editing department.

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TikTok has allowed users to take 21st century humor compilations a step further by easily setting them to equally absurd and goofy ahh original sounds, most often containing lots of cartoon sound effects and familiar meme sounds, like fart noises, distorted Taco Bell bongs, earrape samples and the now wildly popular Augh sound. The less sense the video and its accompanying audio make, the more successful the goofy ahh compilation tends to be. In this way, goofy ahh compilations are essentially just 21st century humor compilations in a shinier package made for those with short attention spans, with the increased focus on cartoon sound effects adding a doubly ironic coat of paint for Zoomers and a way to poke fun at how different comedy is now compared to, say, a cartoon from the 1950s that might unironically use these sound effects for comedic value. The goofy ahh genre doesn’t begin and end with compilations, though. One of the biggest memes in the genre and the fuel that’s kept it going for months is a man named Quandale Dingle, who has more or less taken the throne as the goofy ahh king of Zoomer humor.

The Quandale Dingle meme actually predates the “goofy ahh remixes” popularized by proddadood by a few days. First uploaded to TikTok on September 13th, 2021, the original Quandale Dingle meme is a simple recording of a Windows login screen with the name “Quandale Dingle.” A Snapchat banner across the screen reads, “who tf goofy ass name is this bruh,” notably using “goofy ass” rather than “goofy ahh.” Although the original upload only gained 20,000 views (considerably low for TikTok) the image spread across TikTok and social media at large. It became a staple inclusion in goofy ahh compilations going forward, almost always inspiring comments of “goofy ahh name” or “goofy ass name” under whatever video it appeared in. At some point, "ass" was all but removed completely for "ahh," possibly thanks to the combined virality of both the remixes and Quandale Dingle at the same time.

The rise of both the Quandale Dingle meme and goofy ahh remixes at the same time in September 2021 acted as a perfect mashup of two powerful storms, both popularizing an AAVE term and ultimately creating a subgenre of memes in the process, taking 21st century meme compilations and repackaging them for the new generation. Now, Quandale Dingle has expanded vastly as a meme. Quandale Dingle has been given lore and a voice by user @ticklemytip, who is known for videos where he narrates outlandish diatribes through the voice of characters with goofy ahh names like Quandale Dingle, Albert Fingernoodle and Carl Winstead, a play on the Carmen Winstead sound byte that’s also become a staple in goofy ahh compilations. Quandale is often portrayed as a series of bizarre photoshops of rapper NBA Youngboy and edited into parody RapTV posts, showcasing his bizarre journey through life. The man has become one of the most well-known names in memes today, begging the question, “what does the real Quandale Dingle thing of all this?” Unfortunately, we may never know as all our efforts to reach out to the real Mr. Dingle have fallen flat.

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Considering the speed at which TikTok and TikTok trends move, the goofy ahh memes genre has lasted a surprisingly long time on the platform. New compilations and videos riddled with goofy ahh markers pop up on (and go viral on) the platform every day, giving users consistent new ways to rot their brains with every swipe of the FYP. They won't last forever, but the popularity of goofy ahh compilations is a perfect reminder that TikTok is a lot more than just trendy dances and basic lip dubs, revealing a more unhinged, shitpost-heavy side of the platform that many casual users will never experience.