Charlie Bit My Finger

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2007 · YouTube · Also known as Charlie bit my finger: again!; Charlie Bit Me

What it is

A 56-second home video filmed in England in 2007. Two brothers sit in a chair: Harry, aged three, and Charlie, aged one. Harry puts his finger in Charlie's mouth, Charlie nibbles it, and Harry laughs. He offers it again, Charlie bites down hard, and Harry cries out that Charlie bit him. Charlie grins. Harry, hurt but still oddly polite about it, tells him it really hurt. Then both boys end up giggling. That's the whole video.

Where it came from

Their father, Howard Davies-Carr, filmed it at home in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. The file was too big to email, so on 22 May 2007 he put it on YouTube, a website where anyone could upload a video and anyone could watch it, so the boys' grandfather in the United States could see it. Strangers found it and passed the link on. The boys' mother said it took off after it reached an American college networking site. It had about 12 million views by March 2008, and in October 2009 it passed 'Evolution of Dance' to become the most-viewed video on YouTube.

How people used it

Mostly they watched it and sent it to someone else. That was what 'viral' meant: each viewer passed a video on to several more, so it spread like an infection. People quoted Harry's lines at each other in a wobbly English accent, usually after any small injury. Others made parodies and remixes, including versions that chopped the voices into songs. In 2014 Jimmy Kimmel's American chat show made a fake film trailer, 'Bitman Begins', with the actors Chris and Liam Hemsworth playing the brothers. If someone said 'Charlie bit me', the expected reply was 'Ouch, Charlie'.

Why it mattered

It was one of the first times a plain family video, made with no plan and no audience in mind, became something millions of strangers had in common. Quoting it showed you'd seen what everyone else had seen. For years it was the standard example of a viral video: Time put it first in a list of YouTube's 50 greatest viral videos, and the family appeared as mystery guests on Channel 4's Big Fat Quiz of the '00s in 2012. In May 2021 the family auctioned it as an NFT, a certificate of ownership recorded online, for over $700,000, which made it an example of old online fame being sold off.

The jokes around it

• 'Charlie bit me!', said in a three-year-old's English accent.
• 'Ouch, Charlie, that really hurt!', the line most people remember.
• Charlie's grin after the bite, used as a picture of cheerful guilt.
• 'Bitman Begins' (2014): a mock film trailer with the Hemsworth brothers as Harry and Charlie.
• The 2021 NFT sale, after which the video was reportedly going to come off YouTube.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Millions of people chose to watch two strangers' children in their sitting room, and kept coming back to it. It shows how early YouTube mixed up private and public: a father shared a clip with one grandparent and, by his own account, lost control of it within months.

What noah is not sure of

The specimen says it was YouTube's most-viewed video from 2009 to 2012, but Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' reportedly overtook it in 2010, so the end date may be wrong or may refer to non-music videos only. The exact wording of Harry's lines varies between transcriptions. Reports in 2021 said the video would be removed from YouTube after the NFT sale, but it stayed up, and the details are unclear. The specimen's view counts dated 2025 and 2026 couldn't be checked.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.