TikTok satirist Farha Khalidi isn’t taking questions
The 22-year-old creator has gone viral for satirical Q&As about everything from vaccines to veganism.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩
TIL, courtesy of Khalidi, that that viral “I have the coronavirus, that’s why I don’t have a voice” video is maybe...fake??? —Kate
On TikTok, Farha Khalidi answers questions no one asked her.
“Do masks work?” she reads from her phone, voice scratchy and lazy, in a video posted early in September. “No, they don’t. My boyfriend wore one every day and he still got me pregnant.”
While the 22-year-old’s satirical Q&As regularly get millions of views, her most recent video about abortion, published in the immediate aftermath of Texas’s SB8 abortion law, sits at almost 34 million.
“Should abortion be legal?” she reads from her phone, only to be interrupted by a male voice off-screen.
“Absolutely not,” he says.
“No, not in any scenario?” she asks, running through examples—the pregnant person is a minor, or experiencing financial instability—which are all met with “no” until she finally asks, “What if you were married and you got another woman pregnant?”
Silence.
The video was inspired by a real-life conversation a friend of Khalidi's had with a Bumble date, she tells me over Zoom. It was also made exclusively for TikTok, rather than pulled from her YouTube channel, where she originally sourced her TikToks. Her YouTube, where she now has over 13,000 subscribers and posts a wider range of videos, didn’t take off until she started posting clips from it on TikTok, and it was TikTok that ended up landing her a brief writing gig with comedian Abby Govindan.
Upgrade to read Khalidi break down the inspiration behind her character (which loyal Embedded readers may recognize as having a kinship to TikTokker Emily Uribe's fake celebrity), why she prefers YouTube to TikTok, and how none of her friends expected her to end up making jokes in front of a camera.
