In a dating app world filled with corny icebreakers and tired one-liners, one woman has cracked the code—by channeling Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor.
TikTok user @kathenn25, who goes by Kathenn, took to Hinge earlier this year with a very specific prompt: “I get along best with people who can do the Tim Allen ‘awrhoo’ impression. Let me see what you got.” For anyone who somehow missed the early ’90s sitcom Home Improvement, Allen’s character was known for his signature guttural grunt, which straddled the line between caveman and confused dad.
Apparently, men understood the assignment. Her first video compiling the voice messages blew up on TikTok, with viewers treated to a parade of men making their best—and worst—attempts at the bizarre impression. She captioned it: “My version of the 4B movement includes making men on Hinge do an impression of Tim Allen before they’re allowed to speak to me.”
Woman Asks for Tim Allen ‘Home Improvement’ Grunts on Dating App
From there, the grunts kept coming. In her latest video, she wrote: “They’re baaaaaaaack (they never left, they literally do not stop coming in).” The video has racked up nearly 500,000 views, with over 500 comments. Some viewers were stunned by the accuracy of the impressions. “I refuse to believe that the first one was not sampled directly from the TV show,” one commenter said.
Others were just confused—in the best way. “Is this a kink thing?” one user asked. Someone else chimed in: “This is better than dating.” And maybe they’re not wrong.
It turns out there’s a reason men seem to have this noise hardwired into their brains. As one commenter put it: “The Tim Allen grunt is the REAL Roman Empire for men. I’ve been doing this shit since I was a kid.”
Even Twitter got in on the action. One user posted the video with the caption, “I’m absolutely losing it,” and the tweet shot past a million views.
Ironically, the man behind the sound, Tim Allen, once revealed that the grunt came from trying to get the attention of an all-male audience at a comedy show. “All I was doing on stage, I hear men [grunting]… So I started doing that…and a career was built,” he said during a set at the Laugh Factory.
From sitcom soundbite to dating requirement, the grunt’s legacy somehow lives on.