Culture

I Can’t Stop Watching These TikTok Twins Getting Confused About Who Painted The ‘Mona Lisa’

"Da Vinki?"

by Joseph Earp  23 September 2020
The Voros Twins Da Vinki TikTok

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Pleasures are complicated. Sometimes, things tickle us in ways that we can’t explain, tapping into deep wells of mirth and connection that we didn’t even know we had inside of us. Which is all a way of saying: I can’t stop watching a video in which the Voros Twins find out who painted theĀ Mona Lisa.

There’s some context to that sentence, but only a little, and we can handle it after you’ve seen the video in question, which has lived in my head on a permanent loop in the days since I have seen it.

Just watch:

Okay, time for your crumb of context, as promised. Those two men are named the Voros Twins. They are a pair of Hungarian-born, Canada-residing identical twins who also moonlight as tag team wrestlers and have found considerable fame on the app TikTok.

That fame might seem strange to you, if all you’re going off is the ‘Da Vinki?’ video. But the thing to know is that TikTok isĀ obsessed with twins.Ā ObsessedĀ with them. The app is lousy with content made by identical siblings, from the Stokes Twins to the Mescia Twins to the Dobre Twins.

But the Voros Twins are, to their genuine credit, fairly unique — precisely because it’s impossible to tell how much they are for real. Their content walks a fine line between the abstract, anti-humour of someone like Andy Kaufman and self-referentially dumb videos that have the same viral energy of “they did surgery on a grape” memes.

In some of their other videos, they dance around their kitchen; do weights; and generally just act like loveable siblings who have wondered out of Jim Henson’sĀ The Muppets. If you’re trying to work out whether ‘Da Vinki?’ is a self-own, calculated to make them look as buffoonish as possible, you won’t find the answers in their other content.

That, I think, is precisely the joy of ‘Da Vinki?’ The internet operates under so many frequently exhausting layers of irony, meaning subterfuge and straight-up misinformation that understanding intention can be a job in itself. A piece of content like ‘Da Vinki’ encourages you to forget about all that; to relax, and to sink into the dumbass joy of it all.