Check Your Basement

Editor's Note: This entry contains spoilers for Parasite; read at your own caution.

About

Check Your Basement is a reference to the 2019 thriller film Parasite in which a wealthy family has a man living in their basement without their knowledge. Online, people use the catchphrase as a response to others sharing photographs of their expensive homes and flaunting their wealth.

Origin

On October 5th, 2019, the film Parasite was released in the United States. In the film, director Bong Joon Ho creates a metaphor for income inequality and economic classes through a wealthy family's home. One of the film's major plot points involves a man living in the family's basement unbeknownst to them.^[1]

On January 5th, 2020, Twitter ^[2] user @boojanglies responded to a tweet by supermodel Chrissy Teigen praising the film, "Check your basement chrissy" as a means of criticizing her wealth and possibly misunderstanding the film (shown below).

Spread

Over the next few months, people continued to post^[3] the phrase in reference to expensive homes or memes that featured the house from the film (example below, left).

On March 18th, the phrase went viral in a tweet by Twitter^[4] user @nizahraaa responding to a video by actor and singer Jennifer Lopez, who shared a video featuring her backyard. The tweet received more than 8.4 million views, 248,000 likes and 53,000 retweets in less than two months (shown below, center).

About one month later, comedian Steven Castillo responded to a tweet^[5] from the verified Arizona Cardinals Twitter account, "Check your basement bro." The tweet received more than 3,100 likes and 170 retweets in less than one week (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References