It's Austin, Austin

Origin

‘It’s Austin, Austin’ comes from the KBS documentary series Human Theatre. Its subject was Austin Udaba, a Nigerian man living in Korea, who appeared with his wife Ok-bun in the ‘Austin and Ok-bun’ instalment broadcast from March 4th to 8th, 2019. The scene that became the meme is from the episode of March 7th.

He is working on a construction site and phones his boss to identify himself. Saying his own name and then immediately repeating it — ‘it’s Austin, Austin’ — matches the actual rhythm of a Korean phone call so exactly that it stuck. Other lines from the same broadcast, including ‘why did you pay me so much?’ and a drawn-out sigh of ‘aigo…’, became memes alongside it.

Spread

It spread further through YouTube clips after the broadcast than during it. What characterises this meme is that the humour does not rest on mocking his pronunciation. If anything it is admiration — a foreigner who has absorbed even the conventional cadence of a Korean phone call — and because the footage shows a man working diligently, it is rarely deployed with contempt.

Austin Udaba later founded the clothing brand AIGOBOSS. The name itself comes from the ‘aigo’ of the broadcast: the subject of the meme took the meme as the name of his business.

Usage

Identifying yourself on a call or in a message by repeating your name twice
The variant that keeps the frame and swaps the name
Quoted fondly alongside depictions of someone working hard

The line is short and the structure simple, so any name drops straight in; and since the original never carried an unpleasant tone, people use it without hesitation.