Khaby Lame, the Everyman of the Internet

A former factory worker in Italy has become the fastest-growing content creator on TikTok.

In March 2020, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Khabane Lame, a young factory worker in the northern Italian industrial town of Chivasso, lost his job. He went back to his family’s modest apartment, and despite the urging of his Senegalese father to apply for other jobs, he began spending hours each day posting videos to TikTok under the name Khaby Lame. Using the social media app’s duet and stitch features, Mr. Lame, 21, capitalized on the momentum of viral and often absurdly complicated life hack videos — slicing open a banana with a knife, using odd contraptions to put on socks — by responding to them with wordless, easy-to-understand reaction clips in which he would do the same task in a much more straightforward manner.