TikTok’s “We Did It, Joe!” Trend Is Kind of Creepy, Right?
Published Dec. 8 2020, 12:26 p.m. ET
After the many, many anxious days of counting and recounting votes from the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden was finally announced the winner and president-elect. If you were spending a lot of time on the internet around then (and we know you were because everyone was), then you probably came across a video of vice president-elect Kamala Harris talking to Joe Biden on the phone.
“We did it! We did it, Joe,” she says, beaming. “You’re gonna be the next President of the United States.” The video quickly went viral online, but it has recently reached a new level of popularity. That’s because TikTok got involved and made a whole new (and, honestly, kind of weird) trend using the audio.
“We did it, Joe!” videos are taking over TikTok.
It didn’t take long for the audio from Sen. Harris’ end of the phone call to make the leap to the popular video-sharing app. Not only is “We did it, Joe” highly quotable, but it also sounds almost musical when you listen to it a bunch of times in a row. The people of TikTok jumped on that info, and remixes of the phone call were available pretty much immediately.
But it wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that things took a turn for the truly bizarre. Around Thanksgiving, people started posting TikTok videos of them “saying grace” before the meal. Except they didn’t say grace. They said, “We did it! We did it, Joe. You’re gonna be the next President of the United States.”
And they didn’t merely say those words. They tried to recreate Senator Harris’ cadence and tone exactly, and we’re just gonna say it: It’s kind of creepy how well some people were able to make themselves sound exactly like the original audio.
The effect of a bunch of people with bowed heads chanting “We did it, Joe” is kind of spooky. We’re not the only ones who think so, either. A bunch of people started tweeting that those who were participating in the trend kind of sounded like they were in a cult. And, well… yeah! Kind of!
At the end of the day, it’s just a meme that people were doing to be funny, but we’re not going to pretend it’s not one of the weirder memes we’ve seen. It is!
If you want to make your own version of the “We did it, Joe” meme (for whatever reason), all you need is a group of people who can memorize three sentences and who won’t mind if others get a little weirded out by their participation in the trend. (And, obviously, at least for now, it should only be people you live with!)
“We did it, Joe!” has also become a meme in other corners of the internet.
Don’t be surprised if you hear people saying, “We did it, Joe!” about any old accomplishment (particularly if your name is not Joe). The phrase has become, as they say, a thing. Perhaps it will become the new “You go, Glen Coco!” Only time will tell whether Sen. Harris’ celebratory phone call will have the same lasting power as a throwaway line in Mean Girls.
