About

Kidz Bop Karen is the online nickname given to a woman who left her car and accosted a Lyft driver after he cut her off in traffic. The confrontation was filmed by the Lyft driver's passenger, who told "Karen" that she was setting a poor example for her children in her car. "Karen" replied that her kids couldn't hear her because "they're listening to Kidz Bop." The video and the "Kidz Bop" quote spread in memes after the video was posted in November of 2019.

Origin

On November 1st, 2019, Imgur user cowsarekool^[1] posted videos of a woman accosting a Lyft driver in New York City after the driver cut her off in traffic. cowsarekool provided the context, "This happened to a friend of a friend in NYC and it’s a wild ride start to finish. The back story is she was in a Lyft ride in NYC and the driver cut someone off and 'Karen' just lost it."

Spread

After being posted to Imgur, the video was reposted on YouTube by user Yoshilkagawa, gaining over 57,000 views (shown below). It was also reposted on Barstool Sports Twitter account, where it gained over 5,600 retweets and 35,000 likes.^[2]

Parodies of the video began spreading on Twitter and YouTube shortly after it was posted to the platforms. YouTuber Michael Funston parodied the video the next day by pretending to be one of the children listening to Kidz Bop in "Karen's" car (shown below, top). Twitter user @Happy_spaceman parodied the video by setting it to music from Twin Peaks (shown below, bottom).

Other Twitter users joked about the video by using "Can't hear you because I'm listening to Kidz Bop" as a way to portray how they're unbothered. Examples of this type of post include tweets by @dadevol (shown below left) and @slothsnmoths (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References