Okay, it's 2018. Nothing has ever been on your phone. Seriously. Imagine you just downloaded Instagram and you're in middle school. What do you do next?
For 14-year-old Ibrahim from Iraq, better known as Ibo Eshak in internet lore, creating the account @cumcoochie was the logical first step.
The colorful name, which you can kind of smell (or see, like an oozing toaster strudel, riffing on "blue waffle" shock value 10 years mutated), is an activation code for some Instagram users, unlocking memories for anyone who was tapped into the Instagram "Hood Irony" scene of the late 2010s.
I was probably 16 or 17 when I found the community myself, where @cumcoochie and his orbit of similarly named mutuals challenged what I thought a meme was.
The whole time, I was laughing at content made by a group of 13-year-olds (casting shadows on the cave wall), which shaped my personality (and later career). (How embarrassing.)
Like fluorescent light flashing through a car sunroof on a tunnel drive, @cumcoochie's posts are a euphoric piece of ephemera sprouting from the trenches of a modern, commercial world. Among them, mugshots with strings of numbers, written in Impact font, are paired with captions chanting childish no-no words, like a hymn or a spell, eventually boiling down into a morphine drip of sounds: "Ibo Eshak 4pac Bug sonar."
"Irony" then was an alluring degradation of internet symbols, breaking down every piece of content that the iFunny featured feed taught us how to read. And with that education, seeing Instagram "irony" for the first time was disruptive and rewarding. There was supposed to be a meme there, but there wasn't one. And that was funny.
But that's just "irony," more broadly, a subset of chaotic memes that we discussed in our last interview with Leo Barerra, the admin of Instagram's @azure4001. The "hood" variant of the category is one of the internet's most impactful and controversial brainrot genres, flirting with questionable racial ideologies often reserved for incels and groypers.
But the principles and motives behind Hood Irony are not as clear-cut as that, and a conversation with Ibo Eshak, who many credit as the genre's founder, was the perfect opportunity to investigate and discuss.
For one, who was the Iraqi kid behind it all?
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I was lucky when Ibo commented on my Instagram post about the Azure4001 interview. It felt like a Bigfoot sighting. As two years earlier, I had worked on an entry about him for Know Your Meme, and couldn't find the fresh, digital footprints of the internet cryptid.
And "cyprtid" is an apt description, in this case, because the whole reason I was writing about Ibo to begin with, so many years late, was because he had somehow become the main character of a hilariously half-baked creepypasta created by Spanish-speaking slop-Tokers.
"It's pretty fucking funny, I'm not gonna lie," he said on a call last week. Then, his internet cut out. Questions went unanswered in the static. "Sorry, third-world problems. Am I right?"
The Ibo Eshak creepypasta revolves around a particular, edited image of the meme page admin, who, early in his career, revealed his face to his followers multiple times on his first account @hoodirony.
"I made the mistake of exposing my identity early on, at a time when it wasn't common," he said. "I felt pretty uncomfortable about telling them my real name, Ibrahim, so I decided to tell them my name was 'Ibo' as a nickname, just not to expose too much."
"Ibo" is a pretty common nickname back in Turkey, he said, but to the poisoned irony admins in his "Irony House" group chat, it sounded like "a caveman name."
"So, then I tried lying to them. I was like, 'No, that's actually not my name. My name is actually Isaac.' But then they misread that as 'Eshak.' It just added more fuel to the fire. That's when they merged it together, to become 'Ibo Eshak.'"
The caveman himself is seen staring frog-eyed at the viewer with facial hair barely coming out of its pores, seemingly asking, "Do you love me?" The edit was created by another irony admin at the time named @longtesticles.
"We were fucking around and making edits of each other," Ibo told me.
However, I’ve never seen a @longtesticles face edit before. On the other hand, photos of Ibo are everywhere. There are fit pics, bald pics, candid pics, gradient pics, Drake pics… And in all of them, Ibo’s got that same, sullen expression, as if he’s being held at gunpoint while also holding someone at gunpoint.
He just used to reveal his face a lot, and he didn’t even look thrilled about it. I’ve been thinking and writing about meme page admins doing face reveals for a few years now, so I wanted to know what his instincts were.
“I always thought, ‘One day, I'm going to become a meme,’” he told me. “I felt like showing my face might make my page more memorable, like when YouTubers use webcams so their subscribers remember them. That's what I felt like at that time, as stupid as it sounds.”
He sounded embarrassed by it.
“I wouldn't say I'm embarrassed by it. I mean, some parts of it were embarrassing. I'm not going to lie. A lot of personal shit was shared on the internet. I don't condone giving internet access to children, but my parents were a bit unwise in that regard.”
Little Ibo first logged onto the internet at age 6. He said his big sister used to show him “MySpace and Justin Bieber” in the late 2000s. By 2013, he had full-scale, solo internet use. He made his first Instagram meme page a few years later, in 2017, where he posted “political memes,” all related to “Middle Eastern shit.” When I asked him if he was an “ArabFunny” page, he kind of laughed.
"Not really… Actually kind of… But the page that influenced my page kind of created ArabFunny. He goes by @peter.feels.”
In our interview with Azure4001, the “Feels Era” of Instagram meme pages was briefly mentioned, and for Ibo, like Leo, the whole ironic “feels” schtick was inspirational.
@peter.feels is one of the main culprits of the trend’s original popularity, if not its outright creator.
Ibo actually linked up with him in Turkey one time, when @peter.feels was on vacation there. Istanbul is where Ibo attends college currently.
“It was pretty fucking lit,” Ibo said about it. “We first met in the city center and I shook hands with this guy—it sounds like I'm describing my first girlfriend experience. I was like, ‘Yo,’ and I pointed at the supermarket. ‘Bro, let's go fucking buy beer.’
“From there, we just bought a bunch of beers, a bunch of cigarettes, and we went up the roof of his hotel and just chilled there for a bit.
“It was just such a curve ball, discussing Hood Irony and shit with a person in real life. It felt very absurd.
“Then after that, we just went clubbing, and I crashed at his Airbnb for a few days. It was pretty fucking cool. He was the first American I ever met.”
I imagined the duo’s starry night on the Istanbul roof—that was not gay in any way—just two guys from different timezones, sharing a beer, finally able to talk, face to face, to someone about a sub-genre of memes and a cast of characters that they both knew deeply: a topic that no one else would understand at the time. They just had to travel across a few countries to do so.
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I wanted to know if Ibo had any insight into who created Hood Irony. Did he and @peter.feels ever talk about that? The genre’s vague origin, which has largely evaded research due to deleted accounts and scorched archives, has taken up my time at Know Your Meme before. And I’ve never gotten a clear answer.
Ibo gave me three names.
The first was @real_zztails, also known as @my_name_jeff_hd_vines, who, as of now, only has a defunct subreddit to his name. But pictures of his “artsy ginger BF” face still exist in some places on the internet, paired with his iconic Manky Kong avatar.
Ibo said that he was mostly a repost page, though. “I don't think he made that stuff. Or maybe he did, I don't know. But based on my memory, I don't think he did it.”
Ibo was casting doubt on his own take, but I could hear in his voice that he was addressing an already held perception—held by “zztails truthers” who thought that the redheaded admin of yore was Hood Irony’s creator.
Ibo later told me that he engineered “irony,” not necessarily Hood Irony.
Next on his list was @shittybu. “He was a fucking weirdo,” Ibo said. “That guy's like the Jeffrey Epstein of the Instagram scene.”
I asked him to elaborate.
“We probably should not get into that,” he said, backing off, “For the sake of the blog. There’s some pedophilia allegations about that guy, and that’s all I’m gonna say.”
(Maybe for another piece.)
“And even if the allegations aren’t true,” he said. “He was still a fucking weirdo.”
The last person on Ibo’s list was himself. “I know it sounds narcissistic, but I was one of the earliest pages that posted about Hood Irony memes, like brainrot memes about rappers and shit. And I don't want to come across as narcissistic. I know I’ve said that like a billion times, but… It’s true.”
To make up for his brief self-flattering, Ibo continued to list usernames that inspired Hood Irony, extending his original three. Other than @peter.feels, he called out another page…
Read the rest of this piece on the 65,000 website.
