TikTok Has A Copypasta Problem: Anyway, Here's The Recipe For Brownies

Copypasta is one of the Internet’s greatest achievements. A good copypasta strips back all the visual elements that we tend to associate with memes and offers readers purely textual comedy that hits all the same key notes as a truly successful meme. While copypastas can be considered a form of spam, they’re generally far more accepted than spam comments online. Spam comments tend to come from bots and have a promotional element or sketchy link of some sort that nobody wants to deal with at risk of getting a computer full of viruses. Spam is also used to get a poster’s attention, like continually @ing them on their page or writing the same thing over and over in a Twitch chat. Copypastas, on the other hand, can be thrown into any online conversation with little-to-no context and inspire mixed reactions of confusion and joy for both first-time readers and those who have have read the pasta and get the joke. Without the promotional element, they act as harmless memes that essentially out the poster as a meme enjoyer to the aware and a madman to the unaware who might google the phrase and become a copypasta fan themselves, realizing they just got trolled in a purely funny way. Everyone wins and nobody gets hurt.

Lately, however, copypastas have taken over the comment sections of TikTok videos and it’s getting to the point where the line is blurry between spam and meme. You may have noticed this if you’ve spent even a few moments browsing through the comments of any popular video that comes up on the For You Page recently. Right now, the big spam comment is a recipe for brownies. Browsing through any given viral video’s comments you’ll likely see comment after comment reading: “Anyway, here’s the recipe for brownies: 1/2cup butter 2eggs 1cup sugar 1/3cup cocoa powder 2teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2cup flour.” It’s not even a recipe, just a list of ingredients, but that’s beside the point. The comment first made the rounds on TikTok in March 2021, where it inspired users to create brownies using the recipe and even got a shoutout from the official Netflix account. For whatever reason, a year later, it’s now back with a fury. This time TikTokers aren’t happy about it.

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Critical videos calling out brownie commenters for being unfunny, immature and annoying are popping up with increasing frequency as users get tired of reading the same thing over and over. Their main argument (beyond the comments being annoying) is that the brownie comments drown out and hide actual conversations that the videos might inspire. On TikTok, genuine comment sections can often be more entertaining than the content itself. They’re full of roasts, funny commentary and sometimes crucial context, such as the name or origin of the sound being used or where the joke originated, something that is often easy to lose in the hectic mess that is TikTok. That all gets washed away when the comments are filled with the same brownie recipe over and over and over again. It's a worthwhile point to consider and shows us that many TikTokers don't think these jokes are funny, they just think of them as annoying spam.

Another popular TikTok comment is "Nerf Miner," a meme specific to the Clash Royale fandom. Essentially, it’s an ironic plea by players to nerf the Miner troop, which has been nerfed so much by the team behind the game already that it’s essentially seen as useless to many. “Nerf Miner” used to appear with just as much frequency as the brownie recipe, particularly on videos covering sensitive topics for that added “edgy” kick. Like the brownie comment, it crossed the threshold from funny to annoying a while back and inspired equally salty videos telling nerf miner commenters they’re not funny. Now, it’s coming back around again as “remove miner,” an ironic plea for the Clash Royale team to get rid of the troop overall. Remove Miner only started days ago at the time of writing, but already TikTokers are making videos calling for it to stop, showing us just how tired TikTokers are getting of their comment sections getting bombarded by copypastas.

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At surface level, there might not seem like much of a difference between TikTok’s copypastas and the Internet at large’s copypastas. They’re both human posted, they’re not promoting anything and they’re ultimately used to try and confuse people and give them a laugh. The problem is that there’s nothing inherently funny about the things that TikTokers tend to copy-paste. For example, take perhaps the most well-known copypasta: The Navy Seal Copypasta. The Navy Seal Copypasta is a long-form message written as if spoken by a Navy Seal who’s just become incredibly enraged by whatever the recipient of the pasta posted. Riddled with expletives and inflammatory language, there’s obvious humor in the copypasta from sentence one. For the unaware, it reads like the rantings of a madman and makes you think, “there’s no way someone actually wrote this.” This is a key element in all the most successful copypastas, from “Eat Hot Chip and Lie” to “I Saw Flying Lotus In A Grocery Store.” Beyond that, they can be molded with new elements and are best used when applied to comments strategically as a funny emotional response. They’re malleable like all the best memes and come from an original, funny source. Spamming the Navy Seal copypasta repeatedly might not be that funny, but use it in response to someone whining online and it quickly becomes comedy gold.

In comparing these to TikTok copypastas, well, they really don’t compare. The crux of the humor in TikTok copypastas is the lack of context that most people have surrounding what they’re reading and the element of spam. That same lack of context is an element of copypastas at large, but it’s a secondary element to the joke being read. There’s nothing to laugh at from the get-go with a list of brownie ingredients. It might be funny seeing it flooding a comment section the first or second time, but after that, it gets stale, especially because there is no apparent context to the brownie meme. Nerf Miner has the benefit of having some context behind it regarding the story of the troop’s nerf history, but even then it’s likely only funny to a very specific subsection of Clash Royale players who are willing to understand that history and still doesn’t contain any front-facing joke for the uninitiated. People might be tempted to Google it just because they want to know what it means, not because they need to know if it’s an actual thing said by an actual person or because they want more of it. Instead, they want to know if they're insane for not finding it funny. These types of copypastas run on the belief that spam = funny, a mindset that many online just don’t carry.

There’s also an element of engagement inflation that comes with copypastas on TikTok. When a particularly clout-hungry TikToker notices a spam comment, they might be tempted to make a video referencing that comment just so they can attract hoards of spammers to their comment section, therefore artificially inflating the engagement rate. The more comments the more the video seems to get pushed to the FYP, and if you post a video making the “TikTok famous brownie recipe,” for example, you’re likely to see the effects of those spam comments on your views. This is ultimately a harmless way to take advantage of the spam but also detracts from genuinely entertaining or quality videos showing up on the app, instead pushing lazy videos made for no reason other than to clout chase to FYPs everywhere.

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It’s not all bad. The best TikTok copypastas tend to come from a place of love and comedy. They’re often derived from beloved viral videos on the platform, like Bro Tried to Sneak In Nebraska, which references a specific video that inspired a trend on the platform back in October 2021. These spam comments at least lead the reader-turned-searcher to a tangible video that offers them all the context they need and may lead them down the trend’s rabbit hole, resulting in some genuine enjoyment. The same goes for "I LOVE LEAN!," which originated from a meme and became a spam copypasta after the fact. Still, even with the best of these, there’s a lack of outward comedy and originality in the copypasta itself. It’s like someone spewing their favorite quote from The Simpsons over and over again with no variation or attempt at making something original out of it. Imagine if the Sneed's Feed and Seed or Steamed Hams memes began and ended at “this is funny, let’s spam the quote everywhere until people get sick of it” and lived only as copypastas. The memes would have quickly died. Instead, these memes have stood the test of time and continually produce funny content, just as Why Do They Call It Oven? and Oh, These? My Boobies do. They transcend genres from copypasta to meme and stay funny because of it. TikTokers could do themselves a favor by learning the difference between a good copypasta and spam. Instead, they’re massacring one of the internet’s most beloved meme subcultures, destroying their own comment sections and annoying everyone on the platform in the process one brownie recipe at a time.