21st Century Pop Culture
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50 free 21st Century Pop Culture trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The 21st century has rewritten pop culture at speed. Streaming replaced the video shop, phones became cameras and stages, and a clip filmed in a bedroom could reach more people than a prime-time broadcast. Stars were made by talent shows, memes and comment sections as often as by studios and record labels. This quiz covers the moments everyone talked about since the turn of the millennium: award-show shocks, landmark films, reality television, chart hits, social networks and their founders, viral crazes, video games and the odd royal wedding. You do not need to be an expert in any one of them, because the questions jump between cinema, music, television and the internet. It suits pub quiz teams, family game nights and anyone who has lived through the era with a phone in hand. The questions start with easy openers and build to tougher ones for people who remember every headline, and each answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01At which university did Mark Zuckerberg launch Facebook in 2004, at first for fellow students only?
Harvard
Harvard students were the only people allowed to join at first, and the site went by TheFacebook until it was renamed in 2005.
Q 02Which rapper interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards?
Kanye West
Kanye West took the microphone to argue that Beyoncé deserved the prize. When Beyoncé won Video of the Year later that night, she called Swift back on stage to finish her speech.
Q 03Which singer accepted a prize at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards wearing a dress made of raw beef?
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga's meat dress was later preserved by taxidermists as a kind of jerky so it could go on show at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Time named it the top fashion statement of 2010.
Q 04Which fantasy TV epic accidentally left a disposable coffee cup in shot during a 2019 banquet scene?
Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones showed the cup, from a local café, in the first broadcast of the episode The Last of the Starks. It was digitally erased two days later.
Q 05Which Central Asian country does Sacha Baron Cohen's blundering reporter Borat call home?
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan was played by Romania: the scenes in Borat's home village were filmed in Glod, a Romanian village whose residents later sued the producers.
Q 06Which British singer named four studio albums 19, 21, 25 and 30 after her age at the time?
Adele
Adele expected 25 to be the last album titled this way, calling it the end of a trilogy, then released 30 six years later.
Q 07Which film was wrongly announced as Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars before Moonlight took the prize?
La La Land
La La Land's producers were midway through their thank-you speeches when the error was announced. Presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had been handed a spare Best Actress envelope.
Q 08Which photo app, run by just 13 employees, did Facebook buy for about a billion dollars in 2012?
Instagram was only about 18 months old when the deal was struck. It had started out as Burbn, a location check-in app that its founders refocused on photo-sharing.
Q 09Which social network made co-founder Tom Anderson the automatic first friend of every new member?
Myspace
Myspace had dropped Tom as the default friend by 2010. As a teenage hacker he had broken into a Chase Manhattan Bank computer system, prompting an FBI raid.
Q 10Which two colors was the dress that split the internet in February 2015 finally confirmed to be?
Blue and black
Blue and black was the real thing: retailer Roman Originals did not sell the dress in white and gold at the time. It later made a single white-and-gold one to sell for charity.
Q 11Which animated film beat Monsters, Inc. to the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature?
Shrek
Shrek won the brand-new category in 2002 and was also the first animated film named among the American Film Institute's ten best of the year.
Q 12Which rock star, Johnny Depp's model for Captain Jack Sparrow, later played the pirate's father?
Keith Richards
Keith Richards turned up as Captain Teague in At World's End and On Stranger Tides. Depp had researched eighteenth-century pirates and decided they were the rock stars of their day.
Q 13Which Saturday Night Live writer turned a self-help book into the 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls?
Tina Fey
Q 21Which South Korean thriller was the first non-English-language winner of the Oscar for Best Picture?
Parasite
Parasite had already become the first Korean film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and Bong Joon Ho took the Oscar for Best Director on the same night.
Q 22Which actor's Joker in The Dark Knight earned the first acting Oscar for a comic-book film role?
Heath Ledger
Heath Ledger had died in January 2008, before the film was released, and his family accepted the award on his behalf.
Q 23Which Marvel Studios film was the first superhero movie ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar?
Black Panther
Black Panther lost the top prize to Green Book but still won three Oscars, the first Academy Awards for any film in its shared superhero universe.
Tina Fey got the idea from Rosalind Wiseman's guide Queen Bees and Wannabes, then phoned producer Lorne Michaels to say it could be a film.
Q 14Which Oklahoma zookeeper was the main subject of Tiger King, Netflix's documentary hit of 2020?
Joe Exotic
Joe Exotic, who kept big cats at his park in Wynnewood, also ran for US president in 2016 as an independent novelty candidate.
Q 15Which name for the character nicknamed Baby Yoda was revealed in season two of The Mandalorian?
Grogu
Grogu was officially just the Child until the episode Chapter 13: The Jedi, which also revealed that he was raised at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.
Q 16Which actor played basketball captain Troy Bolton in the Disney Channel film High School Musical?
Zac Efron
Zac Efron did little of Troy's singing in the first film: Drew Seeley provided most of the character's singing voice.
Q 17Which Disney Channel sitcom followed a schoolgirl hiding a double life as a famous pop star?
Hannah Montana
Hannah Montana cast Billy Ray Cyrus as the heroine's father, opposite his real daughter Miley. He was only asked to audition after she had won the lead.
Q 18Which actor starred opposite Martin Freeman's Doctor Watson in the BBC's modern-day drama Sherlock?
Benedict Cumberbatch
Benedict Cumberbatch and Freeman both won Emmy Awards for the series, which moved Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian detective to present-day London.
Q 19In which Southwestern city is Breaking Bad set, after an early script placed the story in California?
Albuquerque
Albuquerque was chosen at the studio's suggestion because New Mexico offered generous financial terms for filming. The first scripts had set the story in Riverside.
Q 20Which singer won the first season of American Idol in 2002, defeating runner-up Justin Guarini?
Kelly Clarkson
Kelly Clarkson's winner's single, A Moment Like This, then made the biggest leap to number one the Billboard Hot 100 had seen, breaking a record the Beatles had held for 38 years.
Q 24Which pop star's 13-year conservatorship ended in 2021 after a long fan campaign for her freedom?
Britney Spears
Britney Spears was placed under the arrangement on February 1, 2008, with her father Jamie among the people put in charge of her affairs.
Q 25On whose talk show did Tom Cruise jump on the couch in 2005, declaring his love for Katie Holmes?
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey's yellow couch got jumped on in May 2005, a month after the couple, nicknamed TomKat by the media, first appeared in public together.
Q 26Which rapper's Lose Yourself, from the film 8 Mile, was the first hip-hop song to win an Oscar?
Eminem
Eminem skipped the ceremony because he did not expect to win, and was asleep at home when the award was announced. He finally performed the song at the Oscars in 2020.
Q 27Which singer pulled away part of Janet Jackson's costume during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show?
Justin Timberlake
Justin Timberlake's move gave English the phrase wardrobe malfunction, and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim credits the incident with leading to the creation of the video site.
Q 28Which South Korean rapper's Gangnam Style became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views?
Psy
Psy passed the milestone in December 2012, five months after release, having tried panda and kangaroo dance moves before settling on the horse trot.
Q 29Which Spanish-language hit topped the US chart for 16 weeks in 2017 after a Justin Bieber remix?
Despacito
Despacito was the first Spanish-language song to top the Billboard Hot 100 since Macarena in 1996. Its run at number one tied the record of the time.
Q 30Which rock band's 2004 concept album American Idiot was later turned into a Broadway musical?
Green Day
Green Day built the record around a suburban teenage anti-hero called the Jesus of Suburbia. The stage version opened on Broadway in April 2010 and won two Tony Awards.