Whats A Father Xxxtentacion — XXXTentacion interview screenshot with blank stare expression from the What's a Father meme

Whats A Father Xxxtentacion

2025catchphrasedeclining

Published August 12, 2026

"What's a Father?" is a viral clip of rapper XXXTentacion from a 2017 interview in which he answers a question about his dad with the blank reply, "What's that? What's a father?" The moment resurfaced on X and TikTok in January and February 2025, where posters mocked it as corny and rebuilt the screencap into a phrasal template paired with the broken-heart emoji.

hip hop memes snowclone memes interview memes delayed virality memes

Overview

"What's a Father?" is a viral clip and phrasal template pulled from a 2017 interview with rapper XXXTentacion, in which he responds to a question about his father with the flat reply, "What's that? What's a father?"1 The moment resurfaced on X and TikTok in early 2025, where posters mocked the delivery as corny5.

By February 2025, the screencap of XXXTentacion staring blankly at the interviewer had been rebuilt into an image macro and snowclone7. Posters swap "father" for another noun and typically append a broken-heart emoji (💔), producing captions like "What's that? What's a Big Chungus? 💔"6.

Origin & Background

Platform
The Fader (source clip) / Twitter / TikTok (viral spread)
Creator
XXXTentacion
Date
2025

The clip comes from "In His Own Words: XXXTentacion," an unreleased 2017 interview that The Fader published on November 22, 20221. About 31 minutes and 24 seconds into the documentary, the interviewer asks XXXTentacion, "Do you have any relationship with your father?" and he answers, "What's that? What's a father?"2 The response sat quietly online for more than two years before catching on with a wider audience.

How It Spread

The video started drifting through TikTok in 2024. On April 22, 2024, TikToker @1400_9990 posted the clip, which pulled in more than 161,600 likes over the following ten months3. It broke through on January 31, 2025, when Instagram user @mistxxked reposted the clip as a Reel and picked up over 36,500 likes in three days4.

Later that day, X user @dearwfe tweeted, "XXXTentacion was corny as hell when he was alive," then quote-tweeted himself with @mistxxked's Reel and the caption "like bruh," gaining over 167,000 likes in three days5. On February 2, 2025, X user @slayworldalby posted a screencap paired with a joke swap referencing Big Chungus, drawing 28,000 likes in a day and helping launch the phrasal template6.

TikTok pushed it further that same day. Creator @whiteboykiann posted a "99.99% Accuracy Reenactment" of the interview that hit 179,100 likes in 24 hours8, while @xojunior riffed on the Druski Dancing and TS PMO ICL formats to introduce the slang "WAF," short for "what's a father?"9

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How to Use This Meme

Posters typically pair the XXXTentacion screencap with a caption in the form "What's that? What's a [noun]? 💔"6. The joke works best when the noun is something obviously familiar to the audience, so the blank response reads as feigned or absurd7. On TikTok, creators often reenact the deadpan pause before the reply, and the abbreviation "WAF" is used in captions and comments as shorthand9.

Frequently Asked Questions