Everyone is going nuts over this Vine, but no, you can't charge a phone with a corndog

There's a video circulating on Vine and Twitter of teens charging an iPhone with a corn dog and Monster energy drink. It's an awesome clip. It's also definitely a hoax.

It starts with one of the boys pouring a can of Monster energy drink into a bowl that holds the corn dog. Another boy then plugs his charger into the corn dog and the phone lights up. The boys go wild.

Since it was uploaded 10 days ago, the Vine posted to the Japanese comedy Vine account CusoWarota has been played nearly 4 million times and shared all over Twitter.

Many of the comments on Vine and Twitter immediately called out that the video was a fake. The most common complaint was the cord charging the phone and the cord being plugged into the corn dog seem to be different cords.

Vine

This is a popular trick in similar "food charging" videos, which is a surprisingly common YouTube trope: "How to charge your phone with a watermelon," "How to charge your iPod with an orange," and "How to charge you iPad with an apple" are all variations on the same theme.

Nearly all of them use two cords and tricky editing to make it seem as though the fruit is charging the phone when in reality, a different charger plugged into an outlet is being used.

YouTube

But the corn dog/Monster energy drink video was uploaded in full on Facebook to the account TrapStyle where it does appear to show the full cord. 

So if it's not two cords, then what exactly is happening here? Barring magic, the best explanation comes from Reddit user mw2dude2010: "It's a video playing on the phone, this is nothing new."

Reddit

So instead of trying this viral video for yourself, just eat the corndog.