Is There a New Ice Bucket Challenge In Town?
This latest awkward social media stunt could become the next big meme of the season.
There may well be a successor to the viral phenomenon that was 2014’s Ice Bucket Challenge, but it’s not as cold and even more intimate.
Dubbed “The Twizzler Challenge,” this social media campaign involves two people chewing on both ends of a – that’s right – until their lips meet in the middle, á la Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. What happens next, I suppose, is up to the participants.
Having survived a close encounter of the awkward kind, you’re then expected to challenge your braheems – who have 24 hours to do the same or donate to New York Collaborates for Autism.
I’m not sure who conceived of this viral awareness campaign, but it first surfaced on March 6, 2015 during Comedy Central’s Night of Too Many Stars: America Comes Together for Autism Programs, when a viewer challenged Today Show‘s Willie Geist to take the Twizzler Challenge with Uzo Aduba from
Netflix’s Orange is the New Black.
So far, #TwizzlerChallenge has simmered on the back burner of our hive consciousness, but who’s to say whether it will truly go viral on a bigger scale.
To date, it’s mainly been television personalities and actors who’ve decided to get all twizzled up, but summer is approaching, and maybe this candy-based challenge will eventually break through to the mainstream. Don’t forget the Ice Bucket Challenge lurked out there in purgatory for over a year before exploding in popularity during the summer of 2014.
If the impact of #TwizzlerChallenge mirrors the success of the Ice Bucket Challenge (which raised $100 million for the ALS Association in a month), then this latest social media stunt-du-jour might escape the label of slacktivisim and become the next big meme of the season.