Negawatt

Submission 37,172

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

About

Negawatt is a viral video of a white guy saying "nigga what" imagined to sound phonetically identical to the word "negawatt." The video trended in memes on TikTok, iFunny and YouTube in 2023 in which the man was placed underneath the Wikipedia definition for "Negawatt market." The original video was posted by a since-deleted Instagram user named Frank Jameson (@jameson_fans), also known as Seamus Jameson, who was a schizo Lolcow for Instagram's Hood Irony community prior to 2019.

Origin

The original Negawatt video was posted to Instagram sometime before September 2019. The earliest discovered repost of the video was uploaded on September 16th, 2019, by Instagram^[1] user @big.black.nigga.balls.hd, gaining roughly 5,800 views and over 440 likes in four years (shown below).

In the comment section of the post, a user asked who it was in the video, to which @big.black.nigga.balls.hd replied with the username @jameson_fans which was the handle of a since-banned Instagram user named Frank "Seamus" Jameson, a schizophrenic Lolcow in Instagram's Hood Irony community prior to 2019 (examples from Instagram^[2]^[3] shown below).

Spread

The video was first reposted to iFunny^[4] on December 10th, 2019, where it gained over 60 smiles in four years. In 2020, the video gained memetic usage on Twitter.^[5] In mid-2022, the post went semi-viral on Twitter^[6] when @makeupbyshaniah captioned it, "mute button still not working on this day of all days," gaining over 400 likes in one year (shown below). In August 2022, a semi-viral repost shared on iFunny^[7] gained over 870 smiles in 11 months.

Despite early usage, the Negawatt meme didn't become notable until mid-2023, when a video started circulating that placed the man saying "nigga what" underneath the Wikipedia definition for "Negawatt market." The video was originally posted by Instagram^[8] user @shitpostsamuel on May 31st, 2023, gaining roughly 117,700 likes in two months (shown below).

Soon after the Instagram video's virality, it was reposted to platforms like iFunny^[9] and TikTok^[10] where it also went viral. Thereafter, variations of the meme surfaced on TikTok, such as a video posted by TikToker^[11] @fwdumpy on June 23rd, 2023, which received roughly 34,800 plays and 3,800 likes in one month (shown below, left). On June 27th, 2023, TikToker^[12] @akaracaa posted a video that stitched a Fuzzz99 video with the Negawatt video, gaining roughly 1.5 million plays and 260,900 likes in one month (shown below, right).

Viral variations persisted on TikTok^[13] and YouTube^[14] thereafter.