What Is the Deal With This TikTok 'Chicken Leg Piece' Video People Are Obsessed With?

Internet trends and memes don't even pretend to make sense, and it seems like that phenomenon is at its most absurd on Vine's short video replacement, TikTok, that all of the cool kids are using these days. While there are plenty of bizarre trending videos to be found on the platform, a recent series people are referring to as "Chicken Leg Piece" are some of the weirdest things I've ever seen and they require an explanation.

In one video, for example, we're presented with a man who appears to be Desi and is rocking a dope mustache, a track jacket with no shirt on underneath that's zipped open enough to show off a (tasteful?) amount of chest hair. He's flossing numerous pieces of tacky jewelry, and is following instructions on a laptop that gives him clues as to what he should do next. First, he slurps what appears to be some nihari type soup.

The slurp is precipitated by a series of images that are supposed to provide a clue as to what the man in the video should do next. After slurping rather ceremoniously from the bowl, he's then shown an image of a chick, a leg, and some bees. Maybe due to his accent, or some weird inside joke that spawned from the unbridled enthusiasm he has for calling out the names of things he eats and drinks, he's become a bit of a phenomenon.

The "money shot" of his videos always seem to be "chicken leg piece." I don't know what it means. I don't know why people find it funny or entertaining or amusing. I don't know why he dresses the way he does. I don't know why he's wearing mesh tank tops and his eyes get all buggy whenever he takes a bite of food, or why he seems to have some type of political agenda against eating with utensils.

But Chicken Leg Piece Man is a bonafide sensation on TikTok and I personally find his videos a bit disturbing. The man's showed up on the TikTok Cringe subreddit, so there are several people out there who believe that his weirdness is off-putting and cringe-inducing, but it doesn't change the fact that our species' collective humor has become so random that it's reached worrying levels. I mean watch this video below.

Am I missing something here? Am I just an old fogey? Am I out of touch? I feel a lot like the Principal Skinner meme and I hate that TikTok user @ulhaskamathe has made me feel this way. I'll never forgive him for that.

Our boy, Ulhas Kamathe, appears to have tapped into something that is very popular on the internet: food review videos and people eating said food.

But he doesn't really care to talk about the food in the videos that he's eating or breaking down what's in them, or providing his viewers with a constructive summary of how the dishes are prepared or the ingredients that they're comprised of. He'd rather just matter-of-factly state what the food is loudly and take a big bite or swig out of whatever's in front of him. It's the kind of random, how-did-this-get-popular entertainment that pretty much defines TikTok.

His popularity continues to spread on a variety of different social media platforms. He's already a meme, but the question is, just how big of a meme will he become? I still don't understand what it is about his videos that people love, but then again, I wake up with back pain, so I probably am just old.