Why everyone on TikTok is pretending to be an owl

Over the past couple of days, TikTok has been flooded with owl impressions—albeit ones in which the birds sound like various celebrities, have regional accents, or find themselves in hyper-specific situations. 

It’s a trend better seen with your own eyes than explained. 

“My impression of an owl if the owl was Jennifer Coolidge” is one such viral example. “If Trump were an owl,” impersonated another. An “owl but it’s Keira Knightley,” another posted. Or “an owl but it’s Bella Swan,” said yet another. 

The hashtag #owlimpression currently has 13,000 videos of TikTokers “hoo-hoo-ing” in various likenesses. There are also definitive rankings of the best impressions thus far. 

Other celebrities who have received the owl treatment include Shakira, Alan Rickman, Barack Obama, and Hugh Jackman. Even Jonas Brothers members Joe and Nick Jonas have joined in to playfully troll one another.  

Accent-based owl impressions are a big part of the trend, too, with creators demonstrating what owls would sound like if they were from China and Texas or Scotland and Australia. Some are even as specific as an Italian American owl from New York or an owl from the Bronx.

The trend has since snowballed into a bit of a competition for the chronically online over just how niche the impressions can get, building on the internet’s shared cultural language. Here, the distinctive voices of Jennifer Coolidge and Keira Knightley, as well as Hugh Jackman in his role as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, are internet references as much as they are real people. 

Alongside cultural references such as RuPaul’s Drag Race and Love Island, there are the broader impressions of owls in everyday scenarios: an “owl as “a jealous girlfriend” or an “owl who only hangs out with the guys.” There’s an “impression of an owl if it was a dad getting up” and an “owl that trips over a cobblestone that sticks out a little bit too much.” 

While undeniably silly, this trend offers a welcome reprieve from the brain rot and AI slop that have come to dominate much of the internet’s shared spaces in recent months. Perhaps that explains why a trend so genius in its simplicity has caught on with such gusto across the social media platform. 

Sure, ChatGPT’s image generator could certainly morph a celebrity into owl form, complete with sound effects. Or unleash deepfakes of SpongeBob SquarePants characters on the internet. 

With little hesitation, though, the human brain can conjure up what Jennifer Coolidge might sound like as an owl. AI could never come up with an impression like this of an “owl that was on the Titanic.”