Herman Keh’s TikTok goes viral: Actor 'shocked' by its global reach

Herman Keh is no stranger to having his clips go viral on TikTok, but even he's surprised at how much attention one of his recent posts is getting. 

The 2019 Star Search runner-up posted a clip on Saturday (Jun 4) that has since gained 18.1 million views and 2.2 million likes, at the time of writing. With the caption “tiktok or patient more important?”, the 26-year-old actor and co-star Kiki Lim, 20, danced to the Jiggle Jiggle trend in character as a doctor and patient, respectively. 

They filmed the TikTok while on break between filming for their longform series What’s Wrong Doctor. In the clip, Keh continues to enthusiastically dance to the song, before noticing that his patient has collapsed behind him. 

In an interview with 8days.sg on Jun 7, Keh remarked that it’s “actually normal” for his videos on the platform to blow up in terms of engagement and views, with many of them reaching 100,000 views and more. 

That said, he added: “I think it reached a lot of countries, like Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea (because) I couldn’t understand some of the comments. Honestly, I was shocked.” 

At the time of writing, the video has more than 12,500 comments in a range of languages including Spanish, Arabic and Russian, suggesting a much wider reach than Keh himself realised. 

Its virality could be attributed to people mistaking Keh and Lim for a real-life doctor and patient. Some TikTok users left worried comments along the lines of “I hope this is a joke (though)” and “please say it’s a joke”. 

Perhaps that can be taken as a testament to the talent of their costume and makeup teams. 

Keh eventually added a disclaimer to avoid further confusion, saying “we are filming and it was our break time so don’t take it too seriously!”. 

However, most TikTok users who are in the know left comments in good humour, like one who said, “it’s ok I paused the video, so she didn’t fall”, and others who said Keh portrayed the type of doctors they would be. 

Maybe dancing, and not laughter, is the best medicine.