Salad Fingers: how the patron saint of Weird YouTube came to life

Maybe Firth’s definition of ‘disturb’ is just different to most people’s, or maybe he’s blind to animation’s more affective elements due to his familiarity with the medium (which, he says, reduces places, characters, and dead dogs to “just shapes” on a screen). The fact is, many people have been disturbed by Salad Fingers, including Dr Jessica Balanzategui, a media lecturer at RMIT who recently published the first academic paper on the series, alongside co-author César Albarrán-Torres. “I’ve been transfixed and horrified by Salad Fingers since he first appeared on YouTube,” says Balanzategui. “I distinctly remember sharing the series with friends and delighting in their grossed out, disturbed, disbelieving, but also joyful reactions.” 

Many people’s first encounter with Salad Fingers came via the newly-launched YouTube of 2005, despite the success of the first few episodes on Newgrounds a year earlier. Firth characterises this media landscape as a haven for independent creators, in contrast with the era’s established broadcast channels of TV and film. (Writing about the emergence of Generation Flash in the early 2000s, media theorist Lev Manovich agreed, placing the movement in direct opposition to “the Baroque assault of commercial media”.) In this sense, Salad Fingers can be seen as a relic of early internet media platforms – before corporations muscled in with giant ad budgets and began to call the shots on content moderation – and rudimentary technologies like Adobe Flash, an animation software that proved vital for artists working with the limited-bandwidth internet of the 90s and early 2000s. “There was no censorship, it didn’t feel like there was any corporate control,” says Firth. “No one watching over [you], no one saying you couldn’t use this music, or you couldn’t say this. Absolute freedom. And everyone was trying their hardest to be as messed up as possible.”

“There was no censorship. No one watching over you. Absolute freedom. And everyone was trying their hardest to be as messed up as possible” – David Firth

Years later, this online ecosystem would go on to inspire one of Balanzategui’s key areas of interest as a researcher: the “digital uncanny”, and its entanglement with an online phenomenon known as Weird YouTube, of which Salad Fingers emerged as a kind of patron saint. “I am very interested in the significant influence of the YouTube weird on culture [and] art,” she says, “and a generation of young people who – like me – had their media and emotional boundaries expanded by strange, creepy videos they discovered on [the platform].”

In Salad Fingers specifically, she adds, elements of the digital uncanny are numerous and multi-layered. First, there’s Salad Fingers’ zombie-like appearance (as spelled out by the influential inventor of the term, Masahiro Mori, the zombie inhabits the very deepest parts of the uncanny valley). Then, there’s the “algorithmic uncanny”, i.e. “the collective discomfort we get from falling into weird rabbit holes on YouTube thanks to the platform’s search and recommender algorithms” – especially when these are surfacing gruesome or vaguely sexualised content to underage users. (For the record, Firth maintains that Salad Fingers should be “mandatory” viewing for children, arguing that it’s much better for them than the other content the algorithm serves up on TikTok or Twitter: “people dying, or Andrew Tate telling them that women are a subspecies.”) Thirdly, says Balanzategui, there’s the vector-based animation style. “Salad Fingers looks and feels hand-drawn by a child, even though his world and movements are characterised by the jerky, unnaturally-automated sequences and procedures of Flash.”

Altogether, these elements make for a truly unusual, and often discomfiting, viewing experience. For both Balanzategui and Albarrán-Torres, this places Salad Fingers among a broader tradition of “surreal and avant-garde cinema”, preceded by the likes of David Lynch, or the comedy duo Tim and Eric.

In the case of Salad Fingers, the comparison to Lynch is particularly relevant: many of the arid landscapes, tortured figures, and dreamlike digressions in the series could have been lifted straight from one of the filmmaker’s paintings, although Firth didn’t discover these until later in his career. Watching Eraserhead, on the other hand, was a formative experience. “Back in the day, I don’t think I liked it at all,” he says, on encountering Lynch’s debut feature as a child around the age of eight. “I kind of rejected it… but something stuck.” Eventually, he would come to see Lynch as a uniquely original artist in a creative landscape where “everything else is just rehashing other ideas”, praising the filmmaker’s intuitive, semi-subconscious approach, which traded clear narrative resolutions for the logic of dreams.

Coincidentally, Firth would go on to direct a David Lynch-starring music video for the Flying Lotus track “Fire is Coming” in 2019, though he had no direct contact with the director and highly doubts that he’s ever heard of Salad Fingers, much less watched an episode on YouTube. “I don’t think he has any idea who I am.”

For the first episode of Salad Fingers, clocking in at just under two minutes, Firth took an intuitive approach reminiscent of Lynch (see also: the Eraserhead-esque sound design, full of repulsive squelches and scrapes). To summarise: Salad Fingers explains his love-slash-lust for rusty spoons – “The feeling of rust against my salad fingers is almost orgasmic” – visits the home of a young child who communicates solely in screeches, rubs a rusty kettle, and leaves. Unsurprisingly, Firth finds it difficult to recall any specific inspirations for the titular character or the loosely defined plot 20 years later.

“The phrase ‘Salad Fingers’ kicked it off,” he explains, stemming from a comment his friend made about his guitar-playing style. Based on this alone, he drew, animated, and recorded the voices for Episode 1: Spoons over the course of a single night, though later instalments like the 15-minute-long Episode 11: Glass Brother have taken up to a year. “But… you can’t get a whole plot and premise from just two words,” he muses. “There had to be more than that. Maybe trauma or something? I don’t remember any trauma, I think I had a really good childhood. But there must have been something, because I’m making all this shit.”

Maybe Salad Fingers is an outpouring of buried childhood trauma. Maybe not. Perhaps the weirdness is just a by-product of Web 2.0 incentives to be “as messed up as possible” – art flowing downstream from technology. Ultimately, the question is best left unanswered: part of Salad Fingers’ appeal is its unpredictable humour and absurdist twists that defy explanation. Even in its most surreal moments, though, Salad Fingers isn’t just random for the sake of being random (this sets it apart from the explosion of millennial cringe a few years later, all flying cats and the narwhal bacons at midnight). Instead, the ambiguity is carefully cultivated, with care given to the consistency and pervasive atmosphere of the series’ “delicate universe”. All the same, “[the narrative] is very open-ended and it can mean different things to different people at different points in time,” says Albarrán-Torres, a scholar and film critic. “It’s like Lynch’s work in that respect: it can mean everything and anything.” 

Like so many other internet artefacts, this ambiguity makes Salad Fingers a locus for fan theories and interpretations. These conversations have occupied forums and comment sections for the duration of the series’ two-decade (and counting) run: is Salad Fingers a survivor of nuclear armageddon, his skin tinged green and teeth decayed by the fallout? Is he actually a reluctant cannibal, whose childlike fantasies represent attempts at psychological repression or Freudian displacement? (Well, Episode Two: Friends does see him ‘accidentally’ lure a child inside his oven.) As Albarrán-Torres points out, this obsessive investigation is typical of online culture, which has always fostered “a strong presence of users looking for secret meaning in pop culture”. But Salad Fingers denies any concrete solutions. Fans can speculate all they want, but their favourite mysteries will ultimately go unanswered. 

According to Firth, no one’s going to crack this enigma anytime soon, either – not even himself. “I remember the first time it happened, I just couldn’t stop laughing at some of the ridiculous stuff,” the animator says, on the subject of fan theories. “[The audience] were finding anagrams in it, saying that ‘Hubert Cumberdale’ was an anagram of ‘Butcher… something’. And all these theories worked!” The funny thing was, they didn’t bear any relation to an overall plan for the Salad Fingers universe, as many commenters suggested. “The whole idea of it all being mapped out is ridiculous,” he adds. “When I’m coming up with an idea, I’ll play a few scenes in my head and just see where it goes. In terms of people working it all out… I mean, they could let me know, because I don’t know what it’s all about.”

It’s similarly difficult to follow the threads of Salad Fingers’ influence on media today, although their presence is undeniable. “We can see the legacy of Salad Fingers’ absurd and horrifying dark comedy in all sorts of unexpected places,” says Balanzategui, pointing to numerous animated series on Adult Swim, or Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, a “horrifying and blackly comic” puppet show that began on YouTube in 2011, before being turned into a Channel 4 show in 2022. This is something of a trend. “We are starting to see these avant-garde Weird YouTube creators breaking through into mainstream media spaces,” she adds, naming Skinamarink director Kyle Edward Ball and Talk to Me’s Danny and Michael Philippou as similar examples.

“We can see the legacy of Salad Fingers’ absurd and horrifying dark comedy in all sorts of unexpected places” – Dr Jessica Balanzategui

An even more apt legacy of Salad Fingers, though, is the kind of humour that you don’t see bleeding through to mainstream media spaces, the kind circulated on YouTube and TikTok by a new generation of creators, Gen Alpha. Take Skibidi Toilet, for example. Just like early Salad Fingers, this tale of toilet-dwelling creatures is animated with free and fairly basic software, verges on nonsensical, and makes use of unlicensed mashups for its soundtrack, a rebellious throwback to the days before strict, algorithmically-enforced copyright claims. Unfortunately, it’s also a bit of a sore subject for Firth. “I had this whole series about a guy that came out of a toilet,” he explains. “That wasn’t the whole series, but one of the features was this entity that travelled through toilets.” Now, thanks to the popularity of Skibidi Toilet, that idea is off the cards. “I don’t wanna see the comments section going, ‘Oh, he got his idea from Skibidi Toilet’. I have this unspoken ethos that everything has to be brand new. If it’s in any way derivative of something else… it tears me up inside.”

Luckily, Firth has plenty more ideas in his notebook, often revisiting premises from decades before and working them into new videos. Plus Salad Fingers itself is yet to run its course. What keeps the series fresh, 20 years on? “I just don’t think it’s been fully explored yet,” says Firth. “I still like the character, and he’s still got plenty of places to go.”

That said, the online landscape is very different in 2024. In many ways, the digital uncanny has flourished beyond what anyone could have imagined two decades ago, via omnipresent algorithms and the proliferation of AI-generated content (which is yet to creep into Firth’s domain of “funny, crappy stuff,” he notes). At the same time, it’s harder than ever for the creators of truly uncanny – and, yes, disturbing – art to make a living. Back in the day, sites like YouTube and Newgrounds offered “freedom from the shackles of more formal distribution, censorship, and other market forces that benefit profit over innovation,” says Albarrán-Torres. Is there still room for that now, when the primary goal of every major content-sharing platform is to sell us things, or scrape our data to sell us even more? 

In other words, could Salad Fingers have been born today, or found a platform like Weird YouTube to call home? Firth’s own videos are now frequently demonetised, and he supports his full-time career as an animator via the same avenues as other creators who want, or need, to maintain their independence: a combination of Patreon subscriptions, and an online store selling plush toys (finger puppet friends and rusty spoon included) plus posters, t-shirts, and hideous latex masks. Without a Salad Fingers fanbase 20 years in the making, of course, this would be a much less viable means of survival. “I don’t think you could really justify making animation for money these days,” Firth admits. “It’s a sad thing.”

Maybe Firth is being a bit pessimistic here. A new generation of emerging creators is still making weird animated films, after all, and finding an enthusiastic audience for them. DaFuq!?Boom!, the creator of Skibidi Toilet, boasts almost 40 million subscribers on YouTube and 3 million on TikTok. Others, like underground filmmaker Justin Tomchuk, AKA Umami, have developed sprawling animated universes with the support of smaller, more dedicated audiences who are willing to fork out for paywalled content. Like Firth, many of these creators exist at the fringes of the modern media landscape – where the “weird” is now reinforced by algorithmic rabbit holes – and make use of new tools, both in the name of accessibility and innovation. Dystopian lifestyle vlogs are filmed in The Sims. Experimental cinema is captured in GTA. Half-Life 2 and Counter Strike assets are mashed together to create new horrors beyond our comprehension. And, of course, AI is making it easier than ever to conjure up new animated visuals (for worse, and for better, if it’s in the right hands). Gruesome, nightmarish, and undeniably uncanny, some even give Salad Fingers a run for his money. But they might not even have existed, if it wasn’t for Salad Fingers itself.

As Balanzategui and Albarrán-Torres conclude in their research, Salad Fingers marked “a crucial moment in the development of contemporary adult animation, in which the uncanny and weird, as aesthetic categories, became mainstream, and opened avenues of expression for contemporary and future visual artists and practitioners”. How many of today’s weird artists had their “emotional boundaries” and limits of taste expanded by this shift? How many can single out Salad Fingers as a reference point for their own effort to push “sensorial and intellectual limits”? Probably a fair few. Or perhaps they’re not even aware of the influence. Perhaps the connection lingers in their subconscious, waiting to be brought to the surface by the mere mention of rusty spoons.