Anatomy of a viral video: Happy Meal™ Karen tells all

Perhaps you’ve seen them on Facebook — videos of nosy neighbours, interfering Karens and overzealous parking inspectors which don’t seem quite right for one reason or another. Sometimes the arguments are stilted and overlong, often they feature the same people again in different scenarios. The comments sections tend to be filled with your uncle explaining what he would have done in the same situation, that guy from two jobs ago debating whether it’s real, and of course, your mate Robbo tagging you because the person in the video… well, it’s so you.

One of these videos escaped Mark Zuckerberg’s containment zone this week (2.2 million views on Facebook, 23,000 comments) and went viral across the wider social web, gathering tens of millions more views on X (fka Twitter), Reddit and TikTok and generating a tsunami of misogynist commentary.

Happy Meal™ Karen (HMK) opens with iPhones at 10 paces in old London town. A blonde woman with her phone out filming approaches a man, who is also recording on his phone, outside a McDonald’s preparing to open a Happy Meal™. The woman is questioning his possession of said children’s meal in the absence of any children. Points are made by both sides: It’s a bit suspicious. It’s not. It is. It’s all I can afford. There’s a very reasonable 99p Savers Menu™. Leave me alone. It’s entirely acceptable to confront you about your Happy Meal™ given recent reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

The work concludes with a creepy stare-down and a warning on behalf of the neighbourhood watch that it would be keeping an eye out for any future suspicious behaviour.

There are some clues that something is amiss which are readily apparent to anyone with the lived experience of having heard a human conversation. Conversely, there is an unsettling intensity in the eyes of the HMK and these people do live among (and sometimes rule over) us. And of course, as some believers asked, what could there possibly be to gain from staging such an encounter?

Using a facial recognition search I quickly identified HMK as prolific horror director/actress Louisa Warren. If you’ve ever visited the free streaming service Tubi you may have seen her work — films like Tooth Fairy: Drill To Kill and Demonic Plastic Surgeon M.D. Any lingering doubts that Warren might genuinely have harangued a man at Maccas are dispelled upon seeing the bubbly demeanour with which she discusses slicing the toes off an evil stepsister for her upcoming Cinderella’s Curse. That sinister dead stare is present, however, in Leprechaun’s Rage, where she plays a pool cleaner with a dark secret (she has crossed a leprechaun).

Warren explained to Crikey that what was to gain for her was about a phone bill’s worth of spare cash. The gig was booked from an acting jobs site and the night before filming she was sent a list of potential scenarios. About 10 are filmed in an afternoon — in another featuring Warren she answers a vox pop interviewer (the Happy Meal™ enjoyer, now finished with lunch) on what she wants out of a man (rich, handsome, good credit with top perfumeries, two beautiful dogs and luscious waist-length locks) — with two or three takes for each. As the algorithmically-required length of the largely-improvised videos often exceeds the natural lifespan of their threadbare conceits it’s not unusual to see an argument organically conclude only to restart to get past the three-minute mark.

The production company then uploads its content gradually to a Facebook page, where it generates engagement — once the page has garnered enough likes, all of the videos are deleted and the page is sold to a brand to be renamed and reused. Warren explained that the producers’ intent is not so much to outright fool people, but to create a product that hovers between reality and unreality. Someone declaring that they have not been taken in provides just as much engagement as someone who is outraged by whatever slight is depicted.

Warren suspects the initial virality was driven by the (not agreed to) title the production company gave the video on Facebook, “Fat Woman Complaining About Guy Having Happy Meal”, and that it gave commenters licence to post hate.

The eventual deletion of the videos is of course a key reason why anyone would agree to be in them, one that is undercut when they are freebooted and reposted on other social networks by culture warriors such as Ian Miles Cheong. Getting a slice of the meagre X ads revenue scheme is reason enough for verified X’ers to ignore the obvious fakery, and the audience for such people preselects for gormlessness. Of course some normal people were taken in too. Perhaps our capacity for critique is dimmed as we graze our way through our feeds, or perhaps we’re not quite ready for a state in which artificial pariahs are produced on an industrial scale?

Warren’s reaction to the affair has gone from mortification to amusement to finally having to completely disconnect from it. You can catch her next as doomed raver Connie in Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, the sequel to last year’s unexpected public domain hit, in cinemas from March 26.