Pingu is a Swiss-British stop-motion claymation series about a young penguin family, originally created by Otmar Gutmann in the late 1980s and aired widely in the 1990s. The show's characters speak a honking gibberish called Penguinese, and Pingu's loud crying became one of its most recognizable sounds. Clips of the wail spread on YouTube and meme pages in the 2010s, then picked up again on TikTok as a reaction audio for sad jokes. It endures because the nostalgic character makes exaggerated sadness instantly funny.