Maybe you’ve seen the original videos — a young woman getting in an Uber, asking if it’s for Chanty Beluga, or walking up to a hostess stand, asking for her reservation for two under the same name. Or maybe you’ve seen the fan accounts posting that they
have dirt on Chanty, or that Chanty hit them with a car or owes them thousands of dollars. Or maybe it’s the delicate cover of the Plain White T’s “Hey There Deliliah” with the name Chanty Beluga swapped in. Or maybe it’s just one of the confused tweets asking what the hell is a Chanty Beluga, anyway?
No matter how you’ve come across her, Chanty Beluga is everywhere. Which may be confusing for some, but not as much as it is for Courtney O’Donnell, the 31-year-old comedian behind the account. When she posted the original video, she tells Rolling Stone in her first interview about the character, it was for the 10 friends who were in on the joke. “And then it started to just really take on this life of its own,” she says.
O’Donnell explains that the character of Chanty was recently born around 4 a.m. on the set of the upcoming comedy Stephanie Bride to Be. The movie — which is executive produced by John Wilson and features Michael Imperioli, Amy Sederis, Saturday Night Live’s Veronika Slowikowska, and O’Donnell, among others — was close to finishing a 10-day improvised shoot in Brooklyn, and a group of actors and writers were sitting around chatting to keep themselves awake. “We were just totally dicking around, being silly,” O’Donnell says. “And I said, ‘Hi, my name’s Chanty,’ and we thought that was funny.” The name just came to her, she says, apropos of nothing. “Then later, I was like, ‘Actually, my name is Chanty Beluga.’ We said the full name, and it seriously went viral in the room. We just could not stop saying Chanty Beluga.”
O’Donnell went home and posted the first video, a quick self-tape of Chanty introducing herself. “People were really connecting to it and thought it was so funny,” she says. So she set up an Instagram account under the name and uploaded a few more.
“I had posted maybe two or three videos, with, like, ‘A woman named Chanty Beluga does this,’” she says, “and there started to be these little fan accounts popping up.” Friends accused her of creating those accounts on her own. “I swear these are random people on the internet,” she told them. “I’m not a psychopath!”
So why is Chanty such a hit? First off, there’s the simplicity of it — the character is, O’Donnell admits, pretty stupid — and the fact that “something about the intonation of the words that feels like crack to say,” O’Donnell suggests. “I think it’s also a response to social media content today, [where] everyone feels like they have to create this content that holds up a mirror to everyone else’s experience. And with Chanty, no one else is named Chanty.”
Chanty is also mysterious, a the blonde-haired blank slate onto which people can layer whatever they want. “She’s a Barbie doll. She’s a paper doll. You can put her in any situation. She can do anything,” O’Donnell says. “I had this instinct to really build her up and create this crazy backstory, but I thought it was more interesting to allow the internet to create its own.”
So far, the lore has been coming in fast. “There’s a lot of [people] saying that Chanty Beluga and Maddie Ralph from Maddie’s Secret have never been in the same room,” she says, referring to John Early’s recent directorial debut. “Then people are starting to post things like, ‘Chanty Beluga owes me $5,000,’ or ‘She hit me with her car,’ or ‘She was in line next to me at Smoothie King and she ordered something crazy.’ Or, like, ‘Watch what comes out about Chanty — she’s gonna be canceled.’” People are creating a whole life for her, O’Donnell says, “which is beautiful.”
O’Donnell’s online comedy is largely based around creating characters, but ironically, Chanty is one of the more subdued personas she’s come up with. She has a fake podcast, Yup, She Went There, in which she and her friend Chelsea Morgan send up the “podcast-clip-farm world that we live in, that is just about saying the craziest thing, or hawking the craziest thing, like Ozempic water or placenta chips.” Her one-woman show, Planet Courtney, which she’s mounting at the La Mama theater in New York on Aug. 26, features another exaggerated version of herself, “tasked with having to save her planet from financial ruin and being taken over by private equity.” This over-the-top Courtney tries out jobs like therapist, waitress, and flight attendant, pulling audience members up to the stage to be her clients. (“Yes, I do tableside guac,” she says.) “It’s a fun, crazy, zany, out-there world, [with] a very millennial girl-boss culture backdrop.”
O’Donnell also made a short film that came out last year, Going Pop, which follows a canceled pop star, also named Courtney, who’s trying to return to fame. “At the time we filmed that in 2024, Katy Perry, Meghan Trainor, [all these pop stars] were trying to hop on the success of Charli XCX and Chappell Roan, who were these artists doing this very interesting thing and celebrating queer culture. So I was like, I want to write a character who’s trying to jump on that moment and step into something that might feel inauthentic in order to gain fame.” On top of that, “to play a pop star was incredible. I wrote a real song for it.” That one, she says, is in talks to develop into a longer-form comedy series. (She notes that she started out wanting to be a singer, as evidenced by some rather impressive YouTube videos still up on her site, covers like Rihanna’s “What’s My Name?” “I’m doing this [in] a really sensual way,” she says with a laugh. “It’s funny because I’m 14 and never kissed a boy.”)
Though O’Donnell started doing stand-up while living in Brooklyn in 2019, it wasn’t until she moved to Los Angeles three years ago that she began playing more with characters. “There was just an energy in L.A. of people making things that really excited me,” she says. “It really opened up my aperture to being like, ‘I don’t want to just be a stand-up. I want to write, I want to act, I want to do it all.”
Her comedy has clearly hit a nerve, often eliciting angry responses from people who don’t get the joke. “I have one video where it’s like, ‘I just invested $15,000 in Palantir, and I’m going to get mochi pancakes with my sister-in-law. Life is good.’ And people are, like, sending me death threats,” she says. “But I’m just satirizing that there are people out there that do say and do those crazy things in 2026.”
For now, O’Donnell is excited for her new fans to see Stephanie Bride to Be when it comes out next year. “You won’t see Chanty in it, but you will know she was born somewhere toward the end of the movie,” she says. “[We’ll] see where Chanty takes us on this journey. I’m not going to stop until I get a brand deal with Raytheon.”
Click here to read the full article.
