The Ibo Eshak Interview

Catching Up With The Creepypasta Character And OG Hood Irony Admin

By O.A. CARRY FOR: 65,000〡PUBLISHED: August 14th, 2025

---

Okay, it's 2018. Nothing has ever been on your phone. Seriously. Imagine you just downloaded Instagram and you're in middle school. What do you do next?

For 14-year-old Ibrahim from Iraq, better known as Ibo Eshak in internet lore, creating the account @cumcoochie was the logical first step.

The colorful name, which you can kind of smell (or see, like an oozing toaster strudel, riffing on "blue waffle" shock value 10 years mutated), is an activation code for some Instagram users, unlocking memories for anyone who was tapped into the Instagram "Hood Irony" scene of the late 2010s.

---

I was probably 16 or 17 when I found the community myself, where @cumcoochie and his orbit of similarly named mutuals challenged what I thought a meme was.

The whole time, I was laughing at content made by a group of 13-year-olds (casting shadows on the cave wall), which shaped my personality (and later career). (How embarrassing.)

Like fluorescent light flashing through a car sunroof on a tunnel drive, @cumcoochie's posts are a euphoric piece of ephemera sprouting from the trenches of a modern, commercial world. Among them, mugshots with strings of numbers, written in Impact font, are paired with captions chanting childish no-no words, like a hymn or a spell, eventually boiling down into a morphine drip of sounds: "Ibo Eshak 4pac Bug sonar."

"Irony" then was an alluring degradation of internet symbols, breaking down every piece of content that the iFunny featured feed taught us how to read. And with that education, seeing Instagram "irony" for the first time was disruptive and rewarding. There was supposed to be a meme there, but there wasn't one. And that was funny.

But that's just "irony," more broadly, a subset of chaotic memes that we discussed in our last interview with Leo Barerra, the admin of Instagram's @azure4001. The "hood" variant of the category is one of the internet's most impactful and controversial brainrot genres, flirting with questionable racial ideologies often reserved for incels and groypers.

But the principles and motives behind Hood Irony are not as clear-cut as that, and a conversation with Ibo Eshak, who many credit as the genre's founder, was the perfect opportunity to investigate and discuss.

For one, who was the Iraqi kid behind it all?

---

I was lucky when Ibo commented on my Instagram post about the Azure4001 interview. It felt like a Bigfoot sighting. As two years earlier, I had worked on an entry about him for Know Your Meme, and couldn't find the fresh, digital footprints of the internet cryptid.

And "cyprtid" is an apt description, in this case, because the whole reason I was writing about Ibo to begin with, so many years late, was because he had somehow become the main character of a hilariously half-baked creepypasta created by Spanish-speaking slop-Tokers.

"It's pretty fucking funny, I'm not gonna lie," he said on a call last week. Then, his internet cut out. Questions went unanswered in the static. "Sorry, third-world problems. Am I right?"

---

The Ibo Eshak creepypasta revolves around a particular, edited image of the meme page admin, who, early in his career, revealed his face to his followers multiple times on his first account @hoodirony.

"I made the mistake of exposing my identity early on, at a time when it wasn't common," he said. "I felt pretty uncomfortable about telling them my real name, Ibrahim, so I decided to tell them my name was 'Ibo' as a nickname, just not to expose too much."

"Ibo" is a pretty common nickname back in Turkey, he said, but to the poisoned irony admins in his "Irony House" group chat, it sounded like "a caveman name."

"So, then I tried lying to them. I was like, 'No, that's actually not my name. My name is actually Isaac.' But then they misread that as 'Eshak.' It just added more fuel to the fire. That's when they merged it together, to become 'Ibo Eshak.'"

The caveman himself is seen staring frog-eyed at the viewer with facial hair barely coming out of its pores, seemingly asking, "Do you love me?" The edit was created by another irony admin at the time named @longtesticles.

"We were fucking around and making edits of each other," Ibo told me.

However, I’ve never seen a @longtesticles face edit before. On the other hand, photos of Ibo are everywhere. There are fit pics, bald pics, candid pics, gradient pics, Drake pics… And in all of them, Ibo’s got that same, sullen expression, as if he’s being held at gunpoint while also holding someone at gunpoint. 

He just used to reveal his face a lot, and he didn’t even look thrilled about it. I’ve been thinking and writing about meme page admins doing face reveals for a few years now, so I wanted to know what his instincts were.

“I always thought, ‘One day, I'm going to become a meme,’” he told me. “I felt like showing my face might make my page more memorable, like when YouTubers use webcams so their subscribers remember them. That's what I felt like at that time, as stupid as it sounds.”

He sounded embarrassed by it.

“I wouldn't say I'm embarrassed by it. I mean, some parts of it were embarrassing. I'm not going to lie. A lot of personal shit was shared on the internet. I don't condone giving internet access to children, but my parents were a bit unwise in that regard.”

---

---

Little Ibo first logged onto the internet at age 6. He said his big sister used to show him “MySpace and Justin Bieber” in the late 2000s. By 2013, he had full-scale, solo internet use. He made his first Instagram meme page a few years later, in 2017, where he posted “political memes,” all related to “Middle Eastern shit.” When I asked him if he was an “ArabFunny” page, he kind of laughed.

"Not really… Actually kind of… But the page that influenced my page kind of created ArabFunny. He goes by @peter.feels.”

In our interview with Azure4001, the “Feels Era” of Instagram meme pages was briefly mentioned, and for Ibo, like Leo, the whole ironic “feels” schtick was inspirational.

@peter.feels is one of the main culprits of the trend’s original popularity, if not its outright creator.

Ibo actually linked up with him in Turkey one time, when @peter.feels was on vacation there. Istanbul is where Ibo attends college currently.

“It was pretty fucking lit,” Ibo said about it. “We first met in the city center and I shook hands with this guy—it sounds like I'm describing my first girlfriend experience. I was like, ‘Yo,’ and I pointed at the supermarket. ‘Bro, let's go fucking buy beer.’

“From there, we just bought a bunch of beers, a bunch of cigarettes, and we went up the roof of his hotel and just chilled there for a bit.

“It was just such a curve ball, discussing Hood Irony and shit with a person in real life. It felt very absurd.

“Then after that, we just went clubbing, and I crashed at his Airbnb for a few days. It was pretty fucking cool. He was the first American I ever met.”

I imagined the duo’s starry night on the Istanbul roof—that was not gay in any way—just two guys from different timezones, sharing a beer, finally able to talk, face to face, to someone about a sub-genre of memes and a cast of characters that they both knew deeply: a topic that no one else would understand at the time. They just had to travel across a few countries to do so.

---

I wanted to know if Ibo had any insight into who created Hood Irony. Did he and @peter.feels ever talk about that? The genre’s vague origin, which has largely evaded research due to deleted accounts and scorched archives, has taken up my time at Know Your Meme before. And I’ve never gotten a clear answer.

Ibo gave me three names.

The first was @real_zztails, also known as @my_name_jeff_hd_vines, who, as of now, only has a defunct subreddit to his name. But pictures of his “artsy ginger BF” face still exist in some places on the internet, paired with his iconic Manky Kong avatar.

Ibo said that he was mostly a repost page, though. “I don't think he made that stuff. Or maybe he did, I don't know. But based on my memory, I don't think he did it.”

Ibo was casting doubt on his own take, but I could hear in his voice that he was addressing an already held perception—held by “zztails truthers” who thought that the redheaded admin of yore was Hood Irony’s creator.

Ibo later told me that he engineered “irony,” not necessarily Hood Irony.

---

Next on his list was @shittybu. “He was a fucking weirdo,” Ibo said. “That guy's like the Jeffrey Epstein of the Instagram scene.”

I asked him to elaborate.

“We probably should not get into that,” he said, backing off, “For the sake of the blog. There’s some pedophilia allegations about that guy, and that’s all I’m gonna say.” 

(Maybe for another piece.)

“And even if the allegations aren’t true,” he said. “He was still a fucking weirdo.”

---

The last person on Ibo’s list was himself. “I know it sounds narcissistic, but I was one of the earliest pages that posted about Hood Irony memes, like brainrot memes about rappers and shit. And I don't want to come across as narcissistic. I know I’ve said that like a billion times, but… It’s true.”

To make up for his brief self-flattering, Ibo continued to list usernames that inspired Hood Irony, extending his original three. Other than @peter.feels, he called out another page.

“‘Pee n-word,’” he said, “But not like, ’n-word,’ like, ’N-I-G-G-A,’ you know?”

He said that the self-redacted username inspired his own username, @cumcoochie.

“The n-word adds an absurdity,” he said.

He and that admin later ran a page together called @ironicdemiks, but Ibo told us he left the page in 2024.

---

But as the interview went on, Ibo kept the question about the creator of Hood Irony in his head, chewing on it. He later brought it up again. This time, he definitively claimed, as a matter of fact, that he was the true creator of the genre.

Then what did Instagram "Hood Irony” mean to him? If he was being truthful–and I didn’t have a real reason to doubt him–then I was speaking to the monk who wrote the scripture on the obscure genre of memes that has since taken over large swaths of TikTok and other social media sites. So,what did Hood Irony mean to its alleged creator?

“Well, the way I like to view it,” he said, “is that it’s just bringing out the inner child in us, when we used to just laugh at retarded shit… Like, you learned about irony in English class, right?”

“Yes?” I said.

“Well, when I used to watch YouTube Poops,” he said, stringing the thought together somehow, “I used to think, ‘I’m going to look back at this shit and cringe.’ And now 10 years later, I literally sit down with my fucking friends and watch that shit on the fucking TV. It’s just like, absurdity never gets old. It is going to be funny one way or the other. This shit, ‘irony’ or ‘absurdity,’ is the longest lasting form of comedy.”

Silhouettes running, random Bluetooth noises, visions of a twerking man in a faint video overlay… Of course! This stuff is ancient knowledge! Ibo was saying that Hood Irony comes from a long line of tradition. It’s the classic subversion of humor for an internet age.

But Hood Irony is inherently Black. If YouTube Poop subverts the formats of cartoons, animations and the average YouTube video, and if @peter.feels draws on, well, Peter Griffin, but also early 2010s Facebook memes, like Weed Bro and Robert Downey Jr. making comments in a meme's bottom half, then Hood Irony draws from Black internet culture. And I wanted to understand why Ibo Eshak, a once 14-year-old Iraqi boy, chose that as his meta to co-opt and absurdify.

“Well, I don't know,” he said on the phone. “I guess it's from hip-hop music. I really like hip-hop music. I always have. I used to follow a lot of hip-hop pages and pages run by Black people, who post a lot of ‘Hood’ content.”

From that period, pages like Hoodville, RapTV and Daquan come to mind, which carried the archetype of “Hood” meme content—a label usually announced in the page’s bio or username. Hood pages were prolific and became marketable—pages like Daquan sold out for millions of dollars. “Hood” became a leading visual and literal language that the average Instagram scroller learned to decipher.

The saturation of Hood content then ultimately led to it getting hacked by meme creators hoping to get their jokes across in an already established codex.

The co-option of AAVE that we see today in the spamming “TS PMO ICL” on TikTok, to the more degenerate and unsavory subversion of explicit Dreamybull videos, stems from the period that Ibo Eshak reigned supreme.

For Ibo, a longtime observer and fan of hip-hop, Hood humor was a language that he felt like he understood and that he could use to communicate with.

“Hip-hop was and is my favorite genre,” he said on the phone. "I didn’t really have any other interests growing up. I just think it’s very creative. Like with rock music, if you remove the guitar, it’s not rock anymore. Rap is very personal. You can use any instrument on that shit and it's still going to be rap. That just creates an opportunity for creativity and growth.”

He listed some of his favorite rappers to me, like Chief Keef, Gucci Mane, Lil B, Young Thug and Sickboi Rari. Ibo also makes beats that he posts on SoundCloud.

“If you put aside the whole political situation, involving America and its support for Israel,” he said, “I'd say America is the most influential country in the world when it comes to music, when it comes to social media, and all this other shit, but especially with music. It’s because American music isn’t even American music. It’s just music. Everybody listens to it. Even my dad listened to American pop music in the ‘80s.”

“Is that uncharacteristic of him?” I asked. “Would someone not expect that?”

“It's not that you wouldn't expect it,” he said. “It’s just fascinating to think about now. It was in Iraq in the middle of a war zone. The country was a war zone at that time, like North Korea. It was worse than North Korea. Before North Korea, there was Iraq. It was so locked off in the world and yet, somehow, he used to listen to all this music.”

“I think he got some of that music from Saddam Hussein’s son,” he said. “He used to run this TV channel at that time, where he used to play pop music on the TV.”

When I had asked Ibo where he was from off the bat, he listed off more countries than I’ve visited, like, he was born in Dubai, lived in Oman, then Turkey, plus spent some time in Lebanon, Bahrain, Qatar, Sweden and Denmark.

At the time of our call, Ibo had been chilling in Baghdad, but he said he usually drives to the north of the country, where his people, Kurds, are from. He says it’s cooler up there and much better than Baghdad and Istanbul.

“Turkey is an extremely antisocial country. They don't like to socialize with anyone. They're very grumpy and there's nothing going on at all.

“There are plenty of fun things to do in my country. I love to sneakily grab some liquor from my uncle and just speed off with my friends and go to the north.” They drink and party up there, and they have fun, but Ibo also wants to see different parts of the world. He loathes the fact that his Iraqi passport doesn’t get him out of the Middle East.

“Is that part of the reason why you love the internet?” I asked.

“Dude, I don't love the internet,” he said. “I just have nothing better to do. I just got lucky with the internet. I mean, I did make some good friends that I've ended up meeting in another life, but it's less so the reason why I use the internet.”

---

I wondered if Ibo’s escapism was an excuse for his edgy tendencies.

From a blatant perspective, critics may describe Hood Irony as racist. Even in Ibo’s present-day posting, he routinely uses the “grape” emoji and the n-word. But in conversation, when naming his friend @peenigga, he opted out of saying his username outright.

The draw of Hood Irony memes (for me at least) is their visual absurdism and Dada nature; but subsets of the genre, like videos that seem to mock gay Black men twerking with immasculation as the punchline, are not a strong case for Hood Irony being a celebration of Black culture.

“I don't think they're poking fun at black people, Ibo said. "I think it's more like poking fun at hip-hop culture and not out of hate of it. I don't think it's out of hate of it. I think it's just too big not to use and joke about.”

“I remember a few pages in the early days,” he said, “that used to post truly extremist shit, but I unfollowed them. They're pretty unthreatening. I just unfollow them.”

He talked some more about the idea of being edgy and I asked him if he’d outgrown being edgy.

“I mean, I feel like edgy memes are kind of the mainstream now. It depends on your definition of edgy. I mean, when most of us grow up, we’re edgy, right? And compared to the levels of edginess we were at that time, back in the early days of Hood Irony, then yeah, I’m less edgy. It’s a part of growing up.”

“And how is being edgy essential to growing up?” I asked. “What does being edgy provide a young guy?”

“I don’t know. I’d say it’s just from being chronically online. The internet just exposes you to a lot of bullshit, and sometimes extremist shit, extreme ideologies… that shit. When you're a kid, you're especially impressionable to shit like that. It gets pretty easy control over you. Some kids have had pretty fucking shallow childhoods. They haven't had much friends and such. So some kids, they have their childhoods defined by the internet. You know what I'm talking about? And as embarrassing as it sounds, I'm one of those.”

---

It was getting late for Ibo in Baghdad. If he were still 14, it’d be way passed his bedtime, but the 21-year-old was still up to talk at 4 am his time. Meanwhile, I was getting ready to go out to dinner.

“You guys have it easy,” he said. “You can travel anywhere. With my passport, I can only travel to fucking Iran and Lebanon.”

But Ibo was optimistic about his future in Iraq. He’s studying to become a software engineer at the moment.

“My whole goal is to gain as much skill as I can to finally be able to move back to my country and just finally get to live in my country for the first time in my life.”

"And by the way, Iraq is a total shithole, but it's the average shithole. It's not a ‘war zone shithole’ anymore. You can compare it with the average county in Central America or some shit like that. And that’s a huge improvement for my country.”

In his free time, Ibo makes music and posts to his personal account, @ibodidk. For memes, you can follow Ibo on @jugraq, where his early Hood Irony instincts live on in the modern day.

---