'SNL' Alum Jay Pharoah Is The Latest To Claim They Invented 'Karen'

Another day, another origin for Karen. The undisputed meme name of the year, which has since been "Ok Boomered" out of the cultural lexicon, Karen is in the midst of a parental dispute. At Know Your Meme, we've tracked numerous origins of "Karen," from the screaming climax of Goodfellas to Dane Cook's 2004 routine "The Friend Nobody Likes."

Karen's humble beginnings don't stop there. There's teen meme favorite Mean Girls, also from 2004, which gave us the "Oh My God, Karen, You Can’t Just Ask Someone Why They're White" snowclone and image macro series. And who could forget 2016's Nintendo Switch Karen? Ok, fine. You probably forgot about her. Now, a new fighter enters the ring.

Since "Karen" is something of a cultural bogeyman for white women calling the police, more have come to claim the meme as their creation. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly on Friday, Jay Pharoah, comedian and celebrity impersonator extraordinaire, reviewed his 2015 standup special Can I Be Me? The joke in question, you guessed, "It's always a Karen."

"I'm the one who started, 'There's always a white woman named Karen,' Pharoah told EW host Lola Ogunnaike.

Pharaoh, clearly in touch with his meme history, mentioned that Dane Cook joke, acknowledging the name's long tail.

"Unbeknownst to me, there was some Karen stuff," Pharoah said, "and I think Dane Cook had some joke about Karen always being somebody annoying, but the white woman named Karen, I experienced that."

Pharoah also called out another Karen origin in the video: The oft-cited "Black Jeopardy" sketch. He recalls longtime SNL writer Bryan Tucker claiming that the sketch launched the meme in 2018, which Pharoah playfully refutes.

I'm seeing a lot of "Karen" on social media. I may be wrong about this, but I think that Karen was first used on the T'Challa Black Jeopardy on SNL, written by me, Michael Che and @SamJayComic – who came up with the name Karen. https://t.co/Hp7FvnmW61

— Bryan Tucker (@BTuckertime) May 23, 2020

And so ends another tale in the "Book of Karen." The name, prophesied for eons, continues to plague modern civilizations with her trigger happy phone fingers and Panera-friendly bob haircut. Her unclear origins, a mystery for future generations to uncover, unpack and update when they find another reference to the name in a YouTube clip from the early 2000s.