Knife Kid / Let Me See What You Have

Submission 24,714

Part of a series on Viral Videos. [View Related Entries]

About

Knife Kid or Let Me See What You Have! refers to a 2017 viral video in which a young boy runs around a swimming pool holding a knife. The video was posted to Twitter in 2017 and inspired fan art referencing it.

History

On September 17th, 2017, Twitter^[1] user @madsmeyers posted a 4-second-long video (shown below) of a kid running circles around a pool during a party, proudly announcing at a distressed adult that he is holding a knife. The adult yells, "No!" and runs after him. The tweet gained over 265,000 likes and 130,000 retweets in five years, also garnering over 45 million views. The video was first reuploaded to YouTube^[2] on September 27th of that year, and accumulated nearly 600,000 views in a comparable span of time.

- Let me see what you have.
- A KNIFE!
- NO!

On September 20th the Washington Post^[3] published an interview revealing that the video was taken during a birthday party. The cousin of the 5-years-old boy's godfather sent him the video via Snapchat, which was then posted on Twitter by a friend of his. The adult speaking in the video isn't the child's mother, but another invitee.

Spread

The video went viral across social media. Following its virality, many online artists created fan art referencing the video, displaying two characters in a chaotic child vs. protective parent scenario. The art explicitely references, but rarely word by word, or even with the mention of a knife, the famous exchange. For example, on September 14th, 2018, Twitter^[4] user @thekilinah posted a drawing of Isabelle from Animal Crossing with a knife using the quotes from the video, gaining over 1,800 likes and 400 retweets in four years (shown below).

On May 8th, 2020, Twitter^[5] user @eisorus posted a piece of Inuyasha fan art referencing the video, gaining over 33,000 likes and 12,000 retweets in two years (shown below, left). On June 30th, Deviant Art^[6] user StarFello posted a piece of Helltaker art referencing the video, gaining over 4,000 views and 80 favorites in two years (shown below, right).