Don't Talk to Strangers

Origin

‘Don’t Talk to Strangers’, also known as Tony and Ezekiel, comes from a short sketch posted by the YouTuber Max Forrest on July 20th, 2013.

The setup could hardly be simpler. Two men stand far apart across a lake and shout at each other. One asks the other’s name, gets ‘Tony’, and yells obscenities using it; the other asks in turn, gets ‘Ezekiel’, and fires the same construction back. The whole joke is the gap between a title that sounds like a public-safety lesson and the puerile shouting match that actually takes place.

Spread

The video passed 4.8 million views over the seven years that followed, but it only detonated as a meme in 2020, when recreations of the scene poured onto YouTube and TikTok. A recreation posted by TikTok user WilliamAveritt1 in May 2020 took more than 980,000 likes.

What really extended its life, though, was animals rather than people. Laying the original audio over footage of two animals facing each other across a distance became the dominant form, and at that point the meme worked on the picture alone — two beings yelling at each other from far apart — without any need to catch the words. That is the stage at which large numbers of users came to know the sound without ever having seen the sketch.

Usage

• As audio over any situation where two parties shout back and forth at a distance
• Dubbed onto footage of two animals facing off or barking
• Parodying a conversation that opens as a greeting and turns abusive immediately

Since the original dialogue is explicit, most recreations mute it or substitute their own lines. What circulates as the meme is not the profanity but the shape of it: ask someone’s name, then use that name to shout at them.

Sources

• Know Your Meme, ‘Tony and Ezekiel’ — Max Forrest’s original sketch of July 20th, 2013; 4.8 million views over seven years; the 2020 wave of YouTube and TikTok parodies; WilliamAveritt1’s May 2020 recreation at over 980,000 likes; the spread of animal versions
• Know Your Meme, ‘Don’t Talk to Strangers’ video entry — the clip as it circulates