One of the most viral videos on the internet right now shows a man stuck inside a tennis racket. His entire torso and one of his legs are trapped inside the oval, which has its strings removed, and people are just standing around him, not helping.
"Fire department gonna be talking about this for generations," joked one X user in a viral tweet.
Since Oct. 31, the 11-second clip has amassed more than 23 million views on X, all thanks to a tweet that reposted it, with many commenters wondering what happened next. Need an update to this immediately," wrote one person in a viral quote-tweet.
"The guy is fine," says Odigie Efe Alex, the video's original creator, who on Sept. 28 shared it on his Instagram account, @official_siralex12, where it received
over 1.5 million views. Alex tells USA TODAY that he wasn't aware of his video's newfound popularity on Western social media.
Alex, 35, lives in Benin City, Nigeria, and he says he filmed the video at his workplace, a local restaurant, where he's hired as an emcee for parties and events. The man in the tennis racket was also an entertainer, a contortionist, hired by the restaurant.
But even Alex and his coworkers were surprised by the stunt and were concerned when the man began slapping the ground, acting like he was in serious trouble.
"He kind of tricked the bar; even the waiters and workers were afraid that he was stuck," Alex says, adding, "You can hear people's voices in the background, and a lot of people were saying, 'Please, you guys should help him.' And later, people started saying, 'It's just playing around.' And that was when one guy said, 'What's wrong with you? I'm going to mash your head!'"
Alex stopped filming when people started getting scared, he says, so he missed the moment when the performer "just sort of stood up." He says he's been trying to get the man's number so he can film another video with him.
Squeezing through a tennis racket is a common contortionist trick. One performer from Kenya named @pancho_.tz on Instagram has a video from April 18 that shows him getting in and out of a racket, now with over 8 million views.
Norwegian contortionist Captain Frodo has similar videos online, like when he fit through two tennis rackets in front of a live TEDx Talk crowd in Sydney in 2015.
Unfortunately, Alex doesn't know the name of the contortionist he witnessed, whose act also involved dancing and magic, he says. But netizens around the world would love to know. "I genuinely can't stop watching. How did he achieve this?" asked one X user. "Once in a generation video," wrote another, with each post attracting thousands of likes.
The man in the tennis racket is even making his way into memes, like one showing a woman typing, "I'm coming over, you better not be stuck in a tennis racket," now with over 79,000 likes.
One X user even wrote, "This dude just gave me the best last minute Halloween costume ever," while showing himself lying on the ground, with his torso in the tennis racket.
One user, unimpressed, replied: "Get your leg in there, bro."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A man stuck in a tennis racket went viral. Here's the story behind the video
