Inexplicably viral video featuring a British teenager's incongruously disappointed reaction to being slapped.

Is it the accent? The dejected tone of voice? Or simply the age-old, giddy absurdity of some well-executed slapstick? There's no use trying to explain why certain videos went viral in the early days of YouTube. This was an era where 'You've Been Framed'-style everyday hijinks met the skit-based mayhem of Jackass, and everything was supercharged by the online world's love of the random.

This 11-second clip of a British teenager being slapped in the face mid-sentence became a runaway hit after it was uploaded to YouTube in 2007. Thanks to online communities and internet humour tastemakers such as 4chan, Reddit and YTMND, the clip became a meme, a catchphrase, and an evergreen kernel of content that persisted through the years. The original upload has now racked up over 16 million views, but this figure can't possibly capture the countless hits across a multitude of gifs, samples, re-uploads and shares on just about every platform and social network, public and private.

Paul Weedon, he who gets slapped, maintains that the moment was purely organic, his reaction is genuine, and the video is a distillation of his teenage friends' love of filming their daft antics. Now, he works as a writer and creative consultant in the music and video games industries, and he has made peace with the video's enduring popularity after regretting selling exclusive rights to the content aggregator Break.com for, as Weedon told Vice in 2021, "pretty appalling terms". Today, creators can turn online fame into a lucrative career. Back then, virality came like a bolt out of the blue – or a slap from off-camera.

In this early viral video Paul Weedon gets slapped in the face and reacts by saying 'I can't believe you've done this'.