About

Don't Open / Close Your Mouth While Watching This refers to a series of ironic challenge videos where the viewer is tasked with keeping their mouth open or closed for the duration of the video while a voice tries to convince them to open or close their mouth, often by tempting the viewer with awards or by scaring them. The trend began on YouTube in March 2021 and spread across the platform over the course of the year.

Origin

On March 25th, 2021, YouTuber^[1] Sowball posted a video titled "Don't open your Mouth while watching this.." where a text-to-speech voice continually tries to convince the viewer to open their mouth, including trying to get the viewer to count along with them, offering a cookie if they open their mouth, then saying "Simon says open your mouth" (shown below). The video gained over 1.1 million views in eight months.

Spread

Over the course of the year, other YouTubers posted direct recreations of the Sowball video, simply changing the TTS voices pitch. On April 17th, YouTuber^[2] Imperfect Bruh recreated the video with a male TTS voice, gaining over 776,000 views in seven months. On April 22nd, YouTuber^[3] BruhAnt posted a remake of the video, gaining over 1.5 million views in the same span of time. On May 14th, YouTuber^[4] RainbowX posted an original version of the meme adding rules to the start, saying you lose the game if you skip, speed up, or leave the video, gaining over 3.9 million views in six months (shown below).

On May 16th, the trend starter Sowball opened a new version of the video to YouTube challenging users to keep their mouths open while watching using similar tactics, gaining over 663,000 views in six months (shown below, left). On May 17th, YouTuber Seffero posted a similar video, gaining over 733,000 views in a comparable span of time (shown below, right).

YouTuber I'm Watching You is known for uploading videos in this style and often uses images of anime girls about to reveal their breasts for the thumbnails as clickbait. On June 11th and 25th, the YouTuber^[5][6] uploaded videos in following the "don't close your mouth" genre, gaining over 1.6 million and 6.3 million views respectively in five months (shown below, left and right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References