TikTok's Tortilla Challenge Involves Slapping Someone With the Taco Staple
Published June 24 2022, 9:49 a.m. ET
An enormous amount of time is spent watching and creating pretty dumb stuff for platforms like TikTok. Some people maimed themselves trying to climb a stack of boxes, and others tried to steal the soap dispensers from their school bathrooms. One of the most recent trends to dominate TikTok, though, is focused on slapping someone with a tortilla, and it is almost sublime in its stupidity.
What is the tortilla challenge on TikTok?
The tortilla challenge is not as simple as just finding another person to smack with a tortilla. Instead, the trend involves two people playing a game of rock, paper, scissors with a tortilla on standby and water in their mouths. The loser of rock, paper, scissors gets smacked with the tortilla, but the real point of the challenge is to keep the water in your mouth throughout the round of rock, paper, scissors, and the subsequent slap.
At its core, the game is a variation on try not to laugh games that adds water and tortillas as additional elements to mix things up. Thanks to the number of variables it involves, the tortilla challenge has become wildly popular on TikTok, and the "tortilla challenge" tag has been included on hundreds of millions of videos.
Where did the tortilla challenge come from?
According to Mashable, the tortilla challenge began with couples who enjoy pranking one another but has since evolved so that any two people can take part in it. It makes sense that this kind of trend, which is ultimately pretty innocent, would have started in a corner of TikTok devoted to ultra sincere pranks between two people who are at least supposed to love each other a great deal.
If you peruse the videos available on TikTok, you'll see that some users are much better at this particular challenge than others. Some users can't even make it to the rock, paper, scissors portion of the challenge without losing their water, while others are stone-faced enough to do the challenge multiple times in a row. This huge disparity in results only makes the challenge more fun to watch, and adds the kind of variety that keeps it from getting old too fast.
The tortilla challenge may be nearing the end of its life cycle.
Like all major TikTok trends, the tortilla challenge isn't going to last forever. It's already defied the odds in some respects by lasting as long as it has, but once a trend like the tortilla challenge makes its way to every corner of the platform, there's nowhere else for it to travel.
As a result, people are likely to move on to some other trend that pops up in one corner of the platform and eventually spreads to every other place. That trend may involve smacking someone with a random food item, or it may be something entirely different. Predicting what's coming on TikTok is much more difficult than predicting the weather. The only thing we know for sure is that change is a constant.
