Quick answer
The WAAA sound comes from @pasairiska, a Russian TikTok creator who films himself doing frantic karate moves and shrieking after each strike. He is doing a deliberate Conor McGregor impression and tags his own videos #conormcgregor, which is why the meme is widely mislabeled as McGregor. The cat versions are made with AI motion control, mapping his performance onto a pet photo, and got rebranded as 'kung fu cat' with a Bruce Lee framing.
The Short Answer
The screaming man in the kung fu cat videos is @pasairiska — a Russian TikTok creator, widely known as Безумный Паша ("Mad Pasha"). He films himself throwing wild, flailing karate strikes and shrieking a strangled "WAAA" after each one.
He is not Conor McGregor. He is not Bruce Lee. He has, somehow, been credited as both.
How One Guy Became Two Celebrities
The mislabeling isn't random, and the two wrong names arrived by completely different routes.
The McGregor half is his own doing
This is the part people get wrong when they call it lazy reposting. Pasha is doing a Conor McGregor impression deliberately. He tags his own videos #conormcgregor. He's bearded, has a similar hairline, and lives in a black hoodie. Search "Russo imitando Connor Mcgregor" and you'll find Portuguese-language pages built entirely around the resemblance.
So when the clip escaped containment, the audience did what audiences do: they collapsed the impression into the original. The meme now travels as "Conor McGregor cat," "McGregor waaa," and the inevitable "CONNOR CATGREGOR." McGregor has never touched it. The name is downstream of a bit he was never told about.
The Bruce Lee half arrived later, via the cats
Bruce Lee had nothing to do with the source clip. He got attached at the second mutation — once people started running the karate footage through AI motion control with photos of their pets.
A screaming martial artist reads as Bruce Lee to basically everyone. So the pet branch picked up #brucelee and #kucingkungfu (Indonesian for "kung fu cat"), spawned captions like "the cat has followed Bruce Lee's tactics," and eventually the whole format got renamed kung fu cat. That's the name that stuck hardest — hard enough that it's now the search term, even though the trend is neither a cat's sound nor Bruce Lee's.
One guy, four names: WAAA, kung fu cat, Conor McGregor cat, and Bruce Lee cat. All pointing at a Russian man in a hoodie. If you're hunting for the original audio, search "waaa" or "wuaahhhh" — the celebrity names are attached to thousands of unrelated videos and will bury you.
Why It's So Hard to Find the Original
Three things conspire against you here.
It has no real name. There's no clean title to search. It circulates as "waaa," "wuaahhhh," "waaaaaaaaaaaaaa original," "woo woo woo waaaaaa," and a dozen other transcription attempts. Nobody agrees on how many A's.
The captions are keyword soup. Videos in this trend carry captions stuffed with every possible search term at once — "kung fu cat," "bruce lee original," "conor mcgregor cat meme," "klingai," "capcut" — all in one block. It's SEO spam, and it makes the real attribution nearly impossible to see. Ironically, that spam is also the best available evidence of where the trend came from: the terms cluster around Bruce Lee, Kling AI, and McGregor simultaneously, which is the whole story in one ugly paragraph.
Know Your Meme won't save you. It has no entry for this meme. Its "Wawa Cat / Oh The Misery Cat" page looks like the obvious match and is a completely different meme — a cat named Kotaro, edited to the "oh the misery" song. Wrong cat, wrong sound, wrong origin.
That absence is itself informative. A trend this large with no KYM entry is a trend that's still early.
How the Cat Versions Are Actually Made
This is the bit most explainers skip, and it's the reason every kung fu cat video looks identical.
They aren't prompted. They're driven.
The technique is motion control (motion transfer): you supply a fixed driving clip — Pasha's karate performance — and a still image of your pet. The model estimates a skeleton from the clip and maps that movement onto your animal. Same rhythm, same strikes, same timing, different subject.
That's why the choreography never varies between videos, and why they all sync perfectly to the scream. If these were text prompts, every cat would fight differently and none of them would land on the beat. It's also why the trend exploded on pets specifically: motion control needs a character, and a house pet is the funniest possible thing to make throw a jab.
There's one non-obvious constraint. The driving clip's skeleton is a human standing on two legs, so the pet in the still has to be standing on two legs too. A cat sitting on a rug has no bipedal skeleton to puppeteer, and the model either refuses or produces something melted. Every good kung fu cat video quietly has a stand-up step before the motion pass.
Make One With Your Own Pet
If you'd rather not source a driving clip and run a two-stage pipeline by hand, the WAAA! template does both steps from a single photo — it rears your pet up onto its hind legs, runs the motion pass, and returns the clip with the original scream intact.
WAAA!
Drop in your pet and let them scream their way through a karate meltdown. One photo, 1 credit, no prompt writing.
Full method, including the prompts and the failure modes, is in the kung fu cat how-to guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the guy screaming WAAA? A Russian TikTok creator posting as @pasairiska, known as "Mad Pasha." He films frantic karate bits and shrieks after each strike.
Is it Conor McGregor?
No — but he's impersonating McGregor on purpose and tags his own videos #conormcgregor, which is how the name spread.
Is it Bruce Lee? No. That label got attached later, once the clip was mapped onto cats and the "screaming martial artist" read as Bruce Lee.
What's the sound actually called? Nothing official. Search "waaa" or "wuaahhhh" rather than the celebrity names.
Why isn't it on Know Your Meme? It doesn't have an entry yet. The "Wawa Cat / Oh The Misery Cat" page is a different meme entirely (a cat named Kotaro).
How are the cat versions made? AI motion control — the karate clip drives the motion, a pet photo supplies the character. Not a text prompt.
Can I make one with my pet? Yes — see the how-to guide, or use the WAAA! template.
Related Reading
- How to Make a Kung Fu Cat AI Video — the full method, prompts, and failure modes.
- How to Make the "If You Grab Me, I'm Gonna Bite You" AI Pet Video — the other big standing-pet trend.
- Viral AI Video Trends of 2026 — what's climbing right now.
- AI Baby Dance Videos: How to Make One From a Photo — motion control on a different subject.
