In March 2020, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Khabane Lame, a young factory worker in the industrial town of Chivasso in northern Italy, lost his job.
He returned to his family’s modest apartment and, despite his Senegalese father’s urging to apply for other jobs, he started spending hours every day posting videos on TikTok under the name Khaby Lame.
Using the duo and stitch features of the social media app, Mr. Lame, 21, took advantage of the momentum of viral and often absurdly complicated life hacking videos – slicing a banana with a knife, using weird gear to put on socks – responding to them with wordless, easy-to-understand reaction clips in which he would do the same task in a much simpler way.
He peels the banana. He puts on a pair of socks. And almost always, he punctuates his gags with the video equivalent of a “duh” punchline, extending his arms as if to say lo and offering an expressive eye roll or nod.
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His first posts were mostly in Italian, with Italian subtitles; sometimes Mr. Lame spoke in his native language with a Nordic accent. But it was the wordless and expressive reaction clips – mock forks turned into spoons with duct tape or champion the sanctity of Italian pizza from a video featuring Sour Patch Kids toppings – which catapulted Mr. Lame to international stardom. With 65.6 million followers on TIC Tac and counting, if he continues to acquire followers at his current rate, or close to it, he will become the most followed creator of the platform. (Currently, 17-year-old Charli D’Amelio has 116 million followers.)
“It’s my face and my expressions that make people laugh,” Lame said in an interview on Wednesday, a national holiday celebrating the birth of the Italian Republic. His quiet reactions, he said, are “global language”.
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Mr. Lame’s meteoric rise as a digital creator is particularly notable as his work lacks the refined production value associated with today’s most famous TikTok stars, many of whom have been adopted by Hollywood. He hasn’t found success joining a collaborative house with other young people in his twenties, or relying on artificial growth like buying followers or views. Its rise has been entirely organic.
The secret to Mr. Lame’s success is his universal quality exasperated by everyone. “Its content demystifies or almost pokes fun at the overproduced trends that are happening on social media, whether it’s life hacks or things like that,” said Samir Chaudry, founder of The Press Publish, a newsletter on the economy of creators. “It almost represents this authenticity in relation to the production. I think it’s very attractive on a large scale to people, that feeling of someone not trying too hard, it’s something that feels genuine.
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About 40 days ago, when Mr. Lame reached 10 million followers, “I realized things were going well,” he said. Today, with over 65 million subscribers, it’s his full-time job.
Global reach, from Italy
Mr. Lame admirers operate fan pages in English, German, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish and more. Well-known YouTubers, including King Bach, have reached out to him for collaborations, and he’s making money through TikTok’s Creator Fund and working with brands, including, he said, the Italian pasta maker Barilla.
“Being an international star,” he said, “I’m in demand a lot more. “
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