One of the places I've been spending time lately has a lot of folks in it from generations younger than mine. There's been a noticeable rise in their amusement at "Ohio," but it hasn't been a rise that tracks with me as an Ohioan.
Ohio has been a meme for a long time. I've been okay with that because it's self-deprecating in a way that matches the local culture: we're okay living here, but it's exceptionally mediocre. We're middling terms of population, our cities are big but not huge or great, our location within the region is close enough to visit but unimportant enough to ignore, and our urban-rural split is painfully even. Portraying that as terrible is how we cope; we know it's not exciting or great here, but it's where we live anyway.
I have never watched a skibidi video, nor do I intend to, but I've seen a clip in the style. I think that that's enough to understand what is going on when I see younger people online joking about Ohio.
When younger folks, often in the same breath as skibidi, like to laugh at "Ohio," it's frustrating to me because they're not laughing with us at the state—they're not actually laughing at the state at all. They have minimal underlying of Ohio as a concept, culture, or state of mind. Whoever is creating the toilet videos is just using it as a silly word and cheap punchline. It feels degrading in how it dismisses the lived experience; buries the gray winters, humid summers, and adjacency to relevancy under "short, funny sounds."
I've felt this frustration before, once when as a child, I was visiting California and happened to be seated next to a person from Japan. She asked where I was from, but couldn't stop laughing when she head "Ohio" as "Ohayo." Sure, we've capitalized on the pun in naming the local anime convention, but to just have real conversation derailed by a non-joke... It doesn't feel right. When I say where I'm from - or other people talk about where I'm from - I want it to mean something.
So yes, we put down Ohio, and we encourage commiseration. But this isn't joining in—it's creating your own joke where Ohioans are part of the punchline. And that feels bad.