Kanye's Blank Stare

About

Kanye's Blank Stare or Staring Kanye refers to a viral video of rapper Kanye West holding still for a camera mistakenly thinking that a photo is being taken. Starting in early 2019, the clip gained popularity in GIF Captions on iFunny, later being used in memes on Reddit and Instagram.

Origin

On May 18th, 2016, The Ellen Show Instagram^[1] account uploaded a video of rapper Kanye West holding still for a camera mistakenly thinking that a photograph is being taken. The video received over 2.7 million views and 160,700 likes in four years (shown below).

Spread

On May 19th, 2016, BuzzFeed^[2] and FADER^[3] reported on the clip.

The clip did not see spread in memes until on January 18th, 2019, iFunny users Avuelix^[4] and Jepsi^[5] posted memes imagining a Facetime call between Kanye and the Staring Hamster (shown below, left and right). The posts received over 8,300 and 5,400 smiles in one year, respectively.

On February 25th, 2019, Tenor^[6] user icyndr uploaded a GIF based on the clip (shown below, left). On March 25th, 2019, iFunny^[7] user ThreeEyedBluePatrick posted the earliest known viral GIF Caption based on it, gaining over 1,100 smiles in one year (shown below, right). On May 4th, 2019, Redditor^[8] IronicBassist03 reposted the meme to /r/kanye subreddit, gaining over 3,800 upvotes

In the following year, the GIF gained notable spread in GIF Captions on iFunny^[9][10] (examples shown below, left and right), with a still image of Kanye also seeing use on Twitter^[11] and Instagram.^[12]

In 2020, the clip saw further spread online, with a number of notable edits based on the clip being posted on Instagram.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References