Meme History: Ohio
If you were born in the 20th century, it's likely you’ve heard some combination of the words “skibidi,” “Ohio,” and “rizz” before and been completely lost.
Origins of Ohio as a Meme
“Screenshots of Despair” is a Tumblr blog run by a guy named Josh Kimball, whose mission is to try and break hearts using aesthetic poetry. To that end, on August 6th, 2016, he posted an image of a Chicago bus station whose sign read, ominously, “Ohio will be eliminated.” This is ultimately where the tidal wave of Ohio memes we’re now all swimming in appears to begin.
The thing to remember here is that to the vast majority of people living on either of the coasts, the midwest United States in general has a reputation for being polite, out of the way, mild-mannered, and well, kind of boring and normal.
What did Ohio ever do to anyone?
Only In Ohio
“Only in Ohio” was one of the first discreet memes to take a run at that question. Evolving into a TikTok trend by 2022, it makes Ohio out to be an emblem of weird and sometimes janky moments hiding in plain sight. With its popularity, the idea of Ohio as an archetype grew to be a broader joke about how everything was messed up in the Buckeye State and the unexpected was to be always expected.
Over time, Ohio the meme leaked into a variety of other meme templates, such as “Wait it's all Ohio?” which originated as a diss of flat earthers on Reddit, or “Can’t even ___ in Ohio” which first appeared on TikTok in August of 2022. This is a riff on “cant have shit in detroit” which itself leverages the reputation of Detroit as a city in decline throughout the late 20th century. But “cant even ____ in Ohio” has to do with its purported spookiness.
Another one, Ohio vs the World, refers to a swath of memes that deal with how the universe might look if Ohio ever decided to take over the world, which is something they often purport that Ohio is about to do.
Swag Like Ohio
When they’re in video format, these memes are almost always accompanied by a hip hop track appropriately called “Swag Like Ohio” by a rapper who was already widely known for his memes and unprovoked controversy––Lil B. “Swag like Ohio” is the anthem for Ohio memers, and lends Ohio memes a soundtrack as dark and unhinged as the actual videos themselves.
As one TikToker Aaron Makelky put it, “Area 51 weird stuff is Ohio.”
So Ohio is a stand-in for everything broken and generally whacked in the world. But what about when it's packaged into a phrase that basically all grown ups have heard by now and been confused by – Skibidi Ohio Rizz?
Skibidi Ohio Rizz
Skibidi originated in a YouTube series called “Skibidi Toilet,” which incidentally recalls general Ohio memes in its description, but, divorcing itself almost entirely from that origin when it made it to TikTok, it now can mean that something is really really good, really really bad, or anything in between. On its own Skibidi doesn't necessarily mean anything, but in context it adds emphasis to whatever the other words alongside it communicate. And “rizz” has to do with the energy they bring to the situation, short for “charisma.”
So if you have Skibidi Ohio Rizz, you’re kind of a weird loser person.
If all of that is a lot, you’re not alone. This meme is more of a collage of individual and random moments than it is any one distinct thing. That’s why it's so messy, and why it's so hard to pin down for any of us old people. Unless you’re 15 and born into it, you might never fully understand.
Only in Ohio.
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