Archaic as I am, I generally don’t feel “old,” at least not what I perceive to be whatever “old” is. This is true for almost all aspects of life, save for trying to understand what makes things popular on TikTok. My kid showed me this short video on TikTok, a video sort of about Range Rovers? Or at least in a Range Rover and featuring the existence of Range Rovers as its primary theme. Anyway, this video seems to have millions and millions of views and likes and thousands of comments and it’s just an elderly British woman asking what car she happens to be in.
That’s it.
I mean, I think that’s it, unless there’s some sort of subtext I’m missing here. But it seems like that’s it. Here, watch for yourself:
@forsmiles_ #foryou #xyzbca #fypã‚· ♬ original sound – ForSmiles
Let’s just break down everything that happens in the video: there’s some coughing as we enter the scene, which is the sumptuous white leather interior of what appears to be a new Range Rover. Our bespectacled, gray-haired star is then revealed, and she asks, in a refined British accent, “What’s this called, then, this latest car?”
The camera then pans to the open door, where a balding man stands casually in the doorframe, wearing a gray sweater, one hand in his pocket, and responds “It’s called a Range Rover, Granny.”
Then, there’s a cut-off laugh and that’s it. Boom! That’s all! That’s the entirety of this little one-act play, where a woman desires to know the name of the vessel she is contained in, and another person, possibly her actual grandchild(?) reveals the answer.
So why the hell is this so popular? It’s been reposted on countless other accounts, including on Instagram and in original and parody form (like this furry-themed one?) on eX-Twitter, too:
It’s called a Range Rover granny ???????? pic.twitter.com/axa2W5EldA
— dorag. (@dorag32) August 26, 2024
Also, it seems to have first arisen in August! But I’m just hearing about it now, which tracks. So it’s a couple months old, and yet there are accounts where the video is re-posted every day, up to this very day. Why?
Again, what am I missing? This seems to not be so much a car-fetishist thing as it may be a British-fetishist thing? Some of the variations of these videos caption it as being “the Most British video” or something about the accents. So perhaps that’s the key here? The intense Britishosity of it all?
I still feel like I may be missing something. But maybe I’m supposed to. Maybe that’s the way of the world now, and I best get used to it.
Does this count a car video? It’s certainly Range Rover-themed. But whatever this is video is actually about, whatever this strange, powerful hook is, it’s not really about Range Rovers. Maybe it’s about the rhythm of the speech, the sounds and pacing, the repetition, the half-truncated laughter and coughing, the unashamed snippetness of it all?
Whatever it is, it’s definitely a Range Rover, Granny.
Modern Rear Bumpers Are A Sad Joke
Someone Traded In An 18 Year-Old Supercharged Range Rover Sport And I Was Terrified. Until I Drove It
This Aston Martin V12-Swapped Range Rover Can Get Absolutely None More British
Welcome to the internet. This video is at least three years old.
To me the thing that is funny is this represents just how generally uninterested many people are about cars. True story: I heard that my Mom got a new car. I asked what kind. She said “a white one”.
40+ years ago my girlfriend at the time classified cars according to colour and cuteness, so I suspect that this phenomenon is not an Internet or tiktok thing.
I remember asking a friend’s parents about their brand new car when I was roughly age 10-11.
I asked them which engine it had, and was shocked when they didn’t know.
I remember then feeling very concerned as I asked “Do you know which fuel it takes?”
Thankfully they knew the answer to that one.
For the record, the car was a Fiat Multipla, which had one gas option and one diesel option.
This is pretty much my reaction to everything on TikTok. Every time I try to watch one of these short-form videos I’m left thinking “That’s it? That’s the entire video? What was the point of that content-less waste of time?”
Luckily for me, I’ve always been an old soul so even when I was one of the youths I was out of touch with stuff like this. I never had to endure the realization that pop culture had passed me by because I was never keeping up with it in the first place.
I think it’s funny because the idea of a British person being so crusty and out of touch that they don’t even recognize a quintessentially upper-crust vehicle is delightful. Forget Neville Chamberlain or Tony Blair… everything’s been going downhill since Oliver Cromwell.
The thing where an account posts the same funny or weird video every day is engagement bait to create an account with a bunch of followers that can be sold – usually to cryptoscammers or other similar lovely people.
The way of the internet is a confusingly and fast-moving one. I’m not even 22 and I don’t get it.
Man, I have too much of an attention span for these things.
(Although in this case, I think it’s just a dumb gag about her sounding excessively British.)
It could very much have been a scene between the balding Prince William and QE2, other than that she was quite “with it” and famously rode in and even drove Range Rovers around the palace grounds. She’d definitely know what one was.
Drove them? She fixed them (or something like them) as a mechanic during WWII. Definitely knew her way around a Range Rover.
Somethings just catch for no good reason for a very short time. i.e. “we’re just normal men”
Alright, I want to pick my fellow Autopians brain, do you think this video is funny, do you see the humor in it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAeKi4Mm0x8
(And for the record, I think it is funny but half the people I show it to think it’s just plain weird)
Funny.
I thought so too!
Dunno, but I gotta step out so I can cut a video that ends with me drawling “This here’s a Fahrbird!”
It’s like an episode of The Crown in some alternative timeline where it’s several decades before the royals start driving Range Rovers, and it falls to Charles to explain it to the Queen Mum.
My lawn. Get off it.
I have heard of this happening. You think you’re with *it*, but one day you realize that they changed what *it* is. Now what you are with isn’t *it*, and what’s *it* seems probably strange and foreign to you
I heard that Coke is *it*
We can’t bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville? I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ’em. “Gimme five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…
Fun fact: you have to be old in order to know this reference.
also: “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.”
Speak for yourself, I consider myself to be perfectly young 😉
My wife and I have this moment after watching yet another TV commercial that makes no sense to us.
We just figure we’re not the ‘target audience’ 🙂
Perfectly cromulent observation.
Uh, Jason…..
Listen buddy; I don’t know how to tell you this in any way other than dead on:
You are old
You are not one-foot-in-the-grave old, and it isn’t a bad thing, as you are in your peak earning years (at least based on the platinum highlights in your beard, I am guessing we are of a similar vintage and both know how to adjust our irq jumpers to allow for a 14.4 modem).
It is to be celebrated, my friend! You have a grasp of the world that 20-somethings just don’t. You have the wherewithal to go and do something about it, to build your legacy here at the Autopian, and to be a great father and husband!
Don’t bemoan not understanding the appeal of the video (which is just a bot grabbing and reposting in order to get clicks so that they earn money) when your age is fantastic in a million ways that youth culture is not. It will be, for them, eventually, but now is the Time of the Torch!
THE TIME OF THE TORCH!
Go forth and conquer, good sir!
14.4K?!?!? You damn kids with your need for speed! I did just fine with my Commodore VIC20, cassette drive, and 300 bps modem. That’s all anyone will ever need!!!
Oh man, I had a VIC20 with a tapedrive. Good times. Welp, time to take my heart pills and fiber.
I never had 300, but I sure did know “LOAD,8,1”
I started at 2400 when we finally got a windows PC. Before that, all of my papers were done from home on a Kaypro II.
That was the first computer I ever programmed on. We had one computer for the entire senior class. Humongous 4k of RAM, which killed my grand plans of writing a poker game.
Altair 8800 kit, 1 k memory, 110 baud modem into university Unix boxes.
What’s a modem?
While I know you are being sarcastic, there may be some people that don’t know….
MOdulate-DEModulate
The analog signal on a telco line would be modulated on one end via the computer doing the sending of information. The receiving modem would demodulate the analog signal into ones and zeroes for the computer at the other end.
That’s right, folks; before there was VOIP, there was IP over Voice.
Clever Insults make the best comedy XD
I guess this means this guy is going to do a dumbass fake FaceTime commercial for some consumer products brand a year or so from now, extend his 15 minutes to 16 1/2.
Idk, seems pretty Ohio to me. Yeah didn’t use that right…
You got that skibidi Ohio rizz, no cap. (Somehow, I know what each of those words mean in internet talk, but don’t really know how they modify each other.)
This seems sus (and cringe) to me.
I think it’s slay, no cap
Oh, fire!
Why are children like this?
I blame the parents.
Youth culture discovers posh white people behaving like, well, posh white people.
Hilarity ensues.
That’s a wrap. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Skibidi Range Rover ?
That’s Sigma Sus, bro.
I almost made it through the day not remembering that exists.
It’s not uproariously funny, but the majority of the humor is found in three places:
A) The phrasing of her question + her accent are extremely British: “What’s this called, then? This latest car?” It’s a posh and extravagant way of asking a very simple question, which, again, is very British and therefore funny.
2) The guy’s very dry, bored, slightly irritated response, and how he answers her as if she asked him what a refrigerator is.
D) The timing of it all is unintentionally perfect
As a British myself it sounds just like any other short clip of people talking.
My kids are far too old to watch Peppa Pig but they do from time to time. Because the Britishness is funny to them. So, anecdotally, this tracks.
Yeah, I think a lot of it is just non-British people being amused by British people. I think it’s lost on a lot of us non-British folks here because a lot of us watch British car youtube/TV people and other such things and the accent doesn’t really sound funny. I don’t know when it happened, but I stopped being able to tell right away if someone was talking with a British accent or not unless I thought about it.
Nope, not a clue.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. Kids these days.
(Shakes fist at cloud)
And get off the lawn while you’re at it.