About

Surprise, Shawty! refers to a video on TikTok in which a father surprises his daughter with a mountain of Christmas presents and happily exclaims, "Surprise, shawty" as she sees them. The original sound^[6] from the video became a popular trend on the platform in late 2020 leading into early 2021.

Origin

On December 16th, 2020, William Elston uploaded a video to TikTok^[1] with on-screen captions reading, "I love making Her Happy," and "Just Came home from school and it was nothing there this morning. Still got more to come but seeing her cry happy tears is a memory" (shown below). In the video, filmed by Elston, his daughter walks into the front door of their home, sees a pile of presents on the couch, and he exclaims, "Surprise, shawty!" She smiles and covers her mouth in shock. The video garnered over 4.1 million views and 920,000 likes in under a month.

Spread

Shortly following Elston's upload, TikTokers began acting out skits set to the sound, typically where one person surprises another, using the "surprise, shawty" shout as the punchline. It's unknown who first used Elston's original sound to start the trend, but some of the earliest examples were uploaded on December 20th, 2020. On that date, for example, mcdonaldshappymealtoy and robertdowneyweenyhutjr posted skits using the sound to TikTok,^[2][3] garnering over 620,000 and 468,000 views respectively (shown below, left and right).

On December 22nd, nickthomps0n uploaded a video to TikTok^[4] using the sound, garnering over 10.7 million views in 2 weeks (shown below, left). On December 25th, avani uploaded a video^[5] filming her sister's reaction opening a gift using the sound, garnering over 8 million views in a comparable span of time (shown below, right). As of January 4th, 2021, these are the two most popular videos using the sound.

As of January 4th, the original sound has been used in over 93,900 videos on TikTok.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References