Monkey With Rizz

Submission 31,955

Part of a series on Monkeys / Apes. [View Related Entries]

About

Monkey With Rizz, also known as Smiling Monkey or Monkey Smiling at Camera, refers to a monkey that smiles and looks at the camera, likened to be him flirting with the meme's viewer, meaning that he has Rizz and is trying to "rizz up" the meme's viewer akin to the Lightskin Stare. The "Monkey With Rizz" became an exploitable, greenscreen, CapCut template on TikTok in early 2023, often paired with a remix of the song "No Guidance" by Chris Brown. The "Monkey With Rizz" monkey is similar to the primate in the Monkey Selfie meme. The original video was uploaded to YouTube in mid-2022.

Origin

On May 17th, 2022, the YouTube^[1] channel Funny Animals TV uploaded a video titled, "Black Macaque Looking At Camera And Smiling" which showed a black macaque monkey looking directly into the camera and smiling. The video gained roughly 5,400 views in 11 months (shown below). The footage was originally taken by videographer Ami Bornstein who uploaded the video to the stock footage website Motion Array.^[2]

Despite a 2022 origin, the video wasn't used in memes until early 2023. Currently, the first discovered meme to use the monkey video was posted by Instagram^[3] user @milkshake.mp3 on February 1st, 2023, and had a top caption reading, "people in 14th century watching a man getting skinned alive." Over the course of two months, the video gained roughly 11,400 views and 4,100 likes (shown below).

Spread

Later on in the month, on February 25th, 2023, TikToker^[4] @111_monkey uploaded a video that used the smiling monkey, inserting the monkey into an indoor setting, adding flashing lights and adding a remix of the song "No Guidance" by Chris Brown as the video's audio. In the video's caption, it read, "#monkey #rizz," and over the course of two months, the video gained roughly 51.2 million plays and 8.3 million likes (shown below, left). After the video's upload, more on TikTok used the meme, such as TikToker^[5] @arabian.monkey on March 5th, 2023, who placed the monkey into an Omegle call, gaining roughly 1.5 million plays and 169,900 likes in one month (shown below, right).

CapCut Template

On April 13th, 2023, CapCut^[6] user Ethan Genders uploaded a greenscreen template using the video, naming it "Monkey with rizz" and gaining over 2,500 likes in two weeks. Usage of the template surfaced on TikTok^[7] soon after, however, viral iterations didn't surface until a week later. For instance, on April 22nd, 2023, TikToker^[8] @mystixverse uploaded a video using the template, making a joke about "rizzing up" another player in Overwatch 2. The video received roughly 49,000 plays and 13,400 likes in five days (shown below).

Over the course of two weeks, the CapCut^[8] template amassed over 7,200 videos that used it.