About

The TumbleweedChallenge is a social game created by late-night talkshow host Jimmy Fallon in which participants roll on the ground to music associated with western genre films. Users then upload their videos to the social media and video application TikTok and tag the video #TumbleweedChallenge.

Origin

On November 8th, 2018, the official Tonight Show TikTok account posted a video of Fallon tagged #TumbleweedChallenge to TikTok.^[1] In the video, Fallon stops mid-conversation and rolls on the ground. Within six days, the post received more than 87,000 reactions and 1,100 comments (mirror below).

Go to @TikTok_US and try the #TumbleweedChallenge #FallonTonight pic.twitter.com/PiRgSiyu63

— FALLONNOW (@FALLON1974) November 9, 2018

Precursor

Shortly after the video was posted, Twitter^[2] user @kristibeann posted an earlier, proto-version of the challenge. In the video, Fallon addresses the camera and says, "I'm going to tumble myself, like a tumbleweed. This is tumbling." The post received more than 1,800 views in six days.

the original #TumbleweedChallenge [@jimmyfallon] 🤣 pic.twitter.com/QjCalFqOyb

— falpal // kristilyn (@kristibeann) November 9, 2018

Spread

On November 13th, 2018, Fallon presented some submissions from the challenge on The Tonight Show. In the video, he shows, among other things, the first submission they received. The post received more than 44,000 views in 24 hours (shown below).

As of November 14th, there have been more than 9 million videos tagged #TumbleweedChallenge on TikTok.

Several media outlets covered the challenge, including The Daily Dot, ^[3] Mashable ^[4] and more.

Various Examples

External References