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BING BONG! How Knicks fans have adopted the weirdest catchphrase as a meme

Welcome to FTW Explains, a guide to catching up on and better understanding stuff going on in the world. You may have seen the phrase BING BONG being thrown around everywhere on Twitter and wondered what was up with that and what it has to do with the New York Knicks. We’re here to help!

BING BONG is everywhere.

Well, at least in New York it is. The Knicks are good again — they just beat the Philadelphia 76ers on Tuesday night and are 3-1 to start the season a year after surprising the NBA in 2020-21. And fans have adopted BING BONG. So let’s tell you the story behind it?

Wait, bing bong? Really?

[Adopts heavy New York accent] THAT’S RIGHT! NEW YORK IS BACK! BING BONG!

Fine. Where does this come from?

Well, Knicks fans tend to be … a little over the top to say the least. And when the team is actually good, they go way over the top.

That was the case a week ago after the Knicks beat the Boston Celtics in double overtime.

Cameras from Sidetalk — which calls itself “New York’s one-minute street show” captured fans going absolutely bonkers. It’s here, and it’s extremely NSFW.

But what you need to know here is there’s one dude who simply says “BING BONG!” into the mic. Here it is, in all its BING BONG glory:

But what IS "bing bong"?

New York City subways play a sound when the doors are closing:

Hear that? Bing bong! That’s also the sound that opens Sidetalk videos.

Has this really become a Knicks thing?

You bet it has. It’s even on the back page of Wednesday’s New York Daily News:

Heck, even new Knick Evan Fournier is on board:

Has anyone tracked down Bing Bong Guy?

Yes! Complex found him: It’s native New Yorker Jordie Bloom. who had this to say:

He knew, for instance, that β€œbing bong” was a phrase that popped up in previous Sidetalk videos and every Sidetalk video starts with the infamous sound warning New York subway riders the doors are closing. More specifically, after watching a few Sidetalk episodes starring a bunch of Coney Island characters, Bloom was uttering β€œbing bong” to his boys, like an inside joke, during a recent bachelor party.

β€œIt had kind of popped into my head as a direct correlation with Sidetalk,” says Bloom. β€œBut there was no correlation with the Knicks whatsoever.”

The Sidetalk creators added this:

β€œIt’s a double-reference that is 1. commonly said in our Coney Island episodes and was invented by Coney Island rapper NemsΒ and 2. is the sound heard in the Sidetalk intro,” Trent Simonian and Jack Byrne told Complex Sports in a joint statement. β€œSince it is a well-known Sidetalk reference and fans recognized us filming an episode outside of the Knicks game, Jordie saw us and threw in a β€˜bing bong’ adlib. We added it into the Knicks episode as a reference to our previous episodes and it has since caught on as the Knicks’ unofficial slogan for the start of the season.”

So this is meme now.

Oh yes it is:

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