About

Homeless Man Doing Kung Fu, also known as Homeless Man Doing Karate or Homeless Man Domain Expansion, is a viral video of a South African man, TikToker @oom_jan_the_china, doing kung fu outside on the street. Four videos of the man doing kung fu were uploaded to TikTok in mid-October 2023 and became the subject of memes in November in relation to the throwing a microwaved honey bun at a homeless man format and related memes about abusing homeless people popularized by TikToker Hoop Angel that year. The videos also became the subject of stylized edits, often set to the instrumental version of the song "High Off Life" by Babykjj.

Origin

Between October 14th and 15th, 2023, TikToker^[1] @oom_jan_the_china posted four videos of a South African man showcasing his kung fu moves out in the street. The most popular of the videos gained over 10.2 million views in a month (shown below, left).

In November, TikTokers began reuploading the video with additional captions, often referring to the subject as a homeless man and tying him to the "microwaved honey bun" and ironic "violence against homeless people" memes popularized earlier in the year by user @hoop.angel. One of the earliest known examples was posted on November 16th, 2023 by TikToker^[2] @iambandhunter, garnering over 9.6 million views in 10 days (shown below, right).

Spread

TikTokers continued to use the video of the African man doing kung fu as a meme over the following days, including further videos referencing the Hoop Angel memes and stylized video edits. On November 21st, 2023, TikToker^[3] @salami_b23 posted a video that gained over 2 million views in six days (shown below).

On November 22nd, TikToker^[4] @.jayxedit posted an edit of the video referencing the domain expansion meme, a reference to the anime series Jujutsu Kaisen, garnering over 24 million views in five days (shown below, left). On November 23rd, TikToker^[5] @bfarr2006 posted a series of redraws of the video, garnering over 240,000 views in four days (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References