Julian Smith CS
Fabrizio Cilento What Julian Smith Hates (and Loves) About Facebook: Social Media Parody As Self-Promotion
YouTube is the third most trafficked site on the Internet, after Google and
Facebook. Each month over one billion unique users watch six billion hours of video, with one hundred hours of video being uploaded every minute. The YouTube Partner
Program launched in 2007 has allowed more than a million creators to earn money from their YouTube videos, with the result that the number of people subscribing daily has more than tripled in the last year.1 As a consequence of this exponential acceleration of production and consumption, the modality through which users experience humor online has transformed, creating a scene of young comedians who are especially skilled in circulating their own content. Through the case study of humorist Julian Smith, this essay investigates what makes YouTube comedians/entrepreneurs successful.
In order to understand and critique the channel juliansmith87 and its connections to various social media platforms, I adopt two strategies. On one hand, I focus on a specific video from the channel called 25 Things I Hate About Facebook; on the other I discuss the channel on a macro-level, looking at it from inception to current state. While
25 Things has not achieved the viral success of other videos by Smith,2 it created an aesthetic formula characterized by two elements: a self-reflexive approach to digital media and a high production value. Today Smith’s channel has an average of two and a half million views per video, with peaks of thirteen million, and his visual style has become widely imitated.
Why are so many users following his work? How did these videos go viral? Once a video goes viral, how does the comedian manage to maintain its privileged status? How Cilento 2 did Smith manage to beat the competition of other users aiming to reach the same visibility? How does he take advantage of our current digital environment and
“convergence culture”?3 At some level, the “phenomenon” of Julian Smith is a product of the proliferation of the inexpensive technologies and sharing platforms that allowed him to capture moving images and distribute them. However, this answer relies on a sort of technological determinism that tends to diminish the talent and the human agency behind
You Tube comedy channels. Contrary to what cultural pessimists such as Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr argued in the early days of YouTube, the most successful content producers are not rank amateurs with any particular talents.4 In order to understand contemporary humor online, one needs to move beyond thinking of You Tubers as trivializing comedy and contemporary pop culture. Going behind the scenes of Smith’s work allows me to deliver a first-hand look at creating comedy videos for the Internet and making a full-time career out of it. Generally presented in a three to five minute format,
Smith’s videos are professionally produced with the most updated digital cameras and editing software and then shared online via pervasive media marketing strategies. Smith proves that YouTube is both a site for personal use (summarized by its tagline “Broadcast
Yourself”) and a platform for the shared artistic visions of comedy entrepreneurs.5 This community is represented by channels such as HISHE (How it Should Have Ended) and
Screen Junkies, which respectively propose animated alternate endings to Hollywood films and the so-called “Honest Trailers,” and Epic Meal Time, whose work enters in the belly of television cooking shows and supersizes them. The new wave of online humorists switched from virtual to real when young comedians/entrepreneurs started collaborating and creating short clips together. Smith’s collaborations and productions Cilento 3 include those with Rhett and Link, Ray William Johnson and Smosh (the tenth and fourth most subscribed channels on YouTube, respectively), Joe Hanson (the father of Current
TV), and the ‘lifecaster’ iJustine (one of the most subscribed female personalities on
YouTube). YouTube comedians/entrepreneurs approach social media and digital platforms with precise commercial strategies, and often crisscross into each other in order to establish artistic and promotional connections. Thus, my study also provides an initial map of some comedy content creators that possess characteristics similar to those of juliansmith87 and evaluate their role in the modernization of digital humor.
From Vernacular Creativity to Online Entrepreneurship
25 Things I Hate About Facebook, the social network parody launched in 2009 by
Smith, was his first video to go viral. It currently has seven and a half million views on
YouTube. This is the video that transformed its author from an everyday YouTube user to a full-time comedian/entrepreneur and a point of reference for other Internet artists.
Smith identified vernacular creativity as the language of YouTube, but aimed to evolve it in a distinctive visual style. In addition, the specific generational target and Smith’s distinguished understanding of social network dynamics made 25 Things unique when compared to similar uploads by other comedians. This is a piece of humor delivered online by a young adult who wanted to be seen protesting digital technology via digital technology.
In 25 Things Julian Smith puts on scene the frustrations shared by Facebook users due to the constant shifting of the social network’s settings. These include a variety of items, from ‘poking’ to difficulties encountered in real-time chats. Today, certain Cilento 4
Facebook settings have become an integral part of our everyday life while others have disappeared, but Smith’s video remains a document of the estrangement and the frustrations users experienced in the early days of the social network. In order to address the awkwardness of the commonplace interruptions during a Facebook chat, Smith places two college students face-to-face. One person begins to speak but promptly stops as soon as he sees the other begin, creating a stagnant effect. The tableau vivant goes further when Smith places Facebook chat images over the pair’s heads as they communicate.
One still relevant issue that Smith engages with in 25 Things is the invasion of older people on the platform. It is well known that Facebook was originally targeted to Harvard
University students who wished to network with one another.6 As time went on, the network began signing up different demographic groups, including parents, grandparents and, at the other extreme, younger teenagers. The difficult coexistence of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” (Prensky, 1-6) interacting on the same platform continues to be a commonly held concern with Facebook, which has experienced a slight decline in popularity and hipness since “mom” and “dad” opened their profiles, monitoring and at times awkwardly interacting with their kids and other relatives by over-sharing. As a result, teenagers are becoming less active on Facebook and have migrated to other social platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr to upload more intimate or provocative content.7 Smith’s successful choice was to engage with the familiar subject of how Facebook controls our digital identities with its infamous ‘peer- to-peer privacy violation.’ Smith represented the subconscious of the Millennial generation by showing how social media revolutionized traditional forms of Cilento 5 communication. The topic had a vast ready-made audience, and it resulted in a significant gain of subscriptions to juliansmith87.
What Social Media Means to Smith (and Vice Versa)
Within a year, Smith’s satire had reached nearly two million views, and Smith was invited to film the first Facebook digital short ever produced, Inside the New
Facebook Layout. Mark Zuckerberg recognized that Smith’s affectionate criticism did not present an antagonist to his cultural politics,8 but instead found ways to integrate it into his business. Thanks in part to the spontaneous feedback, Facebook made modifications to many of the 25 Things Smith hated. For example, notifications from games and apps can now be hidden, eliminating the frustration of game and “Compare
Your Friends” requests. Facebook has negotiated privacy issues on multiple occasions over the years. The company’s fluidity and immediate reaction is a demonstration of how the digital media field is difficult to represent and to parody, a dynamic that reinforces the value of Smith’s work. Smith’s humor will continue to be funny years from now, because it represents a sort of collective “how we were,” and a litmus paper of how we have evolved in increasingly communicating with our peers, relatives, and colleagues via posthuman and hyperreal profiles. 9
The ironic aspect of 25 Things is that, like many Millennials, Smith is reliant on social networks to succeed as a multimedia entrepreneur. The YouTube description of his videos reads “Like me on Facebook” with a link to his account. At the end of each of video, he includes information for both his Facebook page and Twitter account (he has currently reached 402,000 likes and 136,000 followers). Throughout his career, Smith Cilento 6 has used social media to both promote himself and establish an intimate connection with fans that would be unthinkable for previous generations of comedians. Smith frequently uploads and posts pictures from upcoming videos and advertises for open acting positions while also giving fans a glimpse into his personal life through a calculated spontaneity.
Looking at his social network activity, one can learn that he and his wife Sarah (who has an active blog called The One in Pink) met via Facebook and moved to Los Angeles.
They have a daughter, Nora, two cats, Scout and Pepper, and a black Labrador named
Frank. Like many Facebook users, Smith posts pictures and comments about food
(“Three burgers in two days. Take that, body”; or “Currently binging on Wonderful
Sweet Chili pistachios. Where have you been all my life?”). Updates often reveal the behind the scenes of some of Smith’s videos and demonstrate a certain fetishism toward new digital cameras and software programs utilized in his editing/recording studio
(nicknamed the “Spaceship”). At other times Smith looks for props (“Anyone in the L.A. area have a sports car from the 80s or early 90s that I could use for a video?”), extras
(“Nashville: I need 60 people - high schoolers and parents - next Thursday, the 21st.
Group photo at end”), or celebrates recent and future bargains (“Just got an 8-Core Mac
Pro w/ 48GB RAM & 2.5GB GPU. It posted this before I finished typing;” or “New iPhone 6 design lookin' pretty tasty”).
The crucial fact about Smith’s use of social networks is its ambiguity. He is in many ways the typical user who posts about pets, junkfood and the adrenaline boost from scoring a tech deal, endearing him to his fan base: he is one of them. This attitude sets him in opposition to the hierarchy of Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley’s power, wealth and influence: he is not one of them. Thus, his Facebook account is another iteration of the Cilento 7
(only apparent) antagonistic parable through which he gained online popularity. At the
same time, there is no question that he is a successful entrepreneur who, differently from
his followers, gets thousands of likes and shares for each new post, even the most
mundane. In this sense, Smith is drawn into online wealth and power, because, unlike
other users, he acquires wealth and exerts power through the YouTube media circuit he
contributed to fostering.
While Smith’s success is based on a politically incorrect attitude that creates
empathy with his younger audiences, he is also associated with the adult world, since he
may provide inspiration for young entrepreneurs willing to follow his successful pathway
within digital media.10 The comedian rightly sees the dichotomy of teenage naïveté and
adult sophistication as a vital contradiction. He oscillates between these two poles by
creating an inextricable knot of personal and professional life.11 As Frank Rose wrote in
The Art of Immersion:
For most of the twentieth century, there were two distinct mode of storytelling:
the personal and the professional. The story we told informally – on the phone, at
home, at work, existed in an entirely different realm from the professionally
produced narratives on TV and at the movies. But where once there was a divide,
now there’s a blur (205).
Smith capitalized on this blur by staging himself as a former homeschooled Nashvillian who managed to survive in the fast paced and overwhelming media business, a tech geek who has not changed his genuine attitude despite the success and visibility he has gained. Cilento 8
In retrospect, it is clear that 25 Things is not a shallow or grumpy critique of Facebook from a random everyday user, but rather a thoughtful commentary by someone who possessed a precocious and practical understanding of the social network and its intricate dynamics. The convergence that Smith has created between YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and his website JulianSmith.tv (which generates traffic to his YouTube channel by notifying fans when new videos are released) to promote new videos reveals a deliberate willingness to fabricate a solid digital identity.
Between Old and New Media
With “only” one million and a half views circa, The Facebook-sponsored
promotional clip Inside the New Facebook Layout was not quite as successful as its
predecessor. However, it served to provide instant exposure to Smith in old media arenas
at a moment in which he risked losing momentum, and it helped demonstrate that the
success of 25 Things was more than a random accident. After the invitation to the social
network headquarters, Smith earned himself a guest TV appearance on the Tyra Banks
Show and the Huffington Post featured several of his videos.
Despite the viral success and the inclusion in the You Tube Partner Program, it
was still not possible for Smith to sustain himself through his online comedy activity.
Consequently, he co-hosted a Sunday night CW/CBS television series called Smash Cuts
(2009-2011), in collaboration with Joe Hanson and other emerging YouTube comedians.
The show talked about Internet viral videos, and its format was similar to America’s
Funniest Home videos, only modernized by introducing online clips and some sketches in
studio. The rap promo Smith and Hanson created for the show was intended to emphasize Cilento 9
Smash Cuts’ old and new media hybrid nature: “Let me tell you about the show it’s crazy
/ it’s like if Internet and TV had a baby.” Unfortunately the promiscuity advertised in the song was deceptive, and the show barely survived its first season. Smith and his peers were mostly relegated to providing voice-over commentary on pre-assembled Internet material. Smash Cuts did not present original short segments that were easily distributed online, and Smith and his peers lost the essential real-time interaction with their audiences, which encouraged multiple access points to their content. As Jenkins has clarified, for YouTube subscribers the act of sharing and commenting upon a comedy video link on their personal social networks gives an inherent sense of added value to the product (Spreadable Media, 2). Despite Smash Cuts’s cancelation, the experience of hosting the program revealed to be useful when Ray William Johnson (the most successful YouTube comedian/entrepreneur of all time) called on Smith to produce his comedy series Equals 3. This is based on the same principle of Smash Cuts and parodies of online viral videos. However, differently from the TV program, Equals 3 speaks the language of new media by fostering participatory culture, and its host has no fear of appearing unconventional or inappropriate.12 One could say that, although the Equals 3 format is rigid, Johnson’s role and informal attitude are more similar to that of a video blogger than to a TV host. When asked about his famous blurb: “I do not care about being on television” during a Forbes interview, Johnson commented:
I love what I do now and the connection I have with my audience. I feel
extremely fortunate to have a large audience who has been supportive in the
different shows I’ve created…I’m rather dedicated to them; therefore, taking time
away from my audience to spend it on a TV show just doesn’t seem to be a step in Cilento 10
the right direction for me, at least not at the moment. Also, it’s nice not having a
boss.13
The fact that an influential comedian like Johnson called Smith to revamp the visuals of his channel is a demonstration of how the last few years have witnessed the sedimentation of Smith’s shooting style. Smith and Johnson have been catalysts for a generation of comedians that, out of choice or necessity, deliver their comedy skits on alternative platforms. Evidently, a traditional TV format cannot satisfy the specific needs of YouTube comedians/entrepreneurs. Rhett and Link had a negative experience as well when they hosted Online Nation, a program that aired on the same CW/CBS network and only lasted four episodes. To reinforce their online presence, they also hired Smith to produce a series called Goth Boy.
Today Smith owns a production company, the Los Angeles based Papertown, dedicated to shooting commercials, music videos, and digital content for various corporations such as Sony Music Entertainment, Nike, Relativity Media, Google, MTV,
Samsung, Chrysler and H&M. Over the years, Smith has displayed different types of videos on his own YouTube channel: original music videos that parody rap and other genres of music, videos featuring his grandma talking in modern video game slang, speaking-my-mind videos and portraits of non-conventional situations, and non-comedy dramas/mystery videos.
By cultivating the value of spreadable culture, Smith has seriously taken into account the new fruition modality through which people experience his works. Today’s audiences have the freedom to play Smith’s short videos on portable devices, to control Cilento 11 their sequence and flow with a touch. As another successful YouTube comedian/entrepreneur named Freddie Wong blatantly remarked:
You have to assume that videos are being played on laptops, tablets and cellular
phones with tiny speakers. And that there’s going to be noise and other
distractions in the room. And so you have to make it visually interesting in order
to cut through the static noise and to draw the proper attention to the central
message of the video (in Apkon, 19).
The challenges summarized by Wong reflect the visual culture environment in which we live. A viewer at a metro station or in between flights at an airport can easily “dropoff” the video after a few seconds. A bored teenager at home may be multitasking or surfing web pages simultaneously. YouTube comedians/entrepreneurs have responded by reducing the duration of their skits, developing an aesthetic of quickness that has become another core value for their expression. At the same time, they have exaggerated the histrionic acting and intrinsic directorial properties of the visual language.
Since the late 1990s, digital media historians and theorists such as Lev Manovic,
Henry Jenkins, Lisa Gitelman and D.N. Rodowick have underlined that the history of moving images is somehow looping on itself a century after its inception. In effect, sound and color apart, the spirit of works such as The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903) and Granma’s
Reading Glasses (George Albert Smith, 1900) do present strong similarities with contemporary humor. Like YouTube clips, comedy silent films produced on the East
Coast film studios at the beginning of the 20th century were brief in duration, and were experienced in individual peepshow viewers such as the Kinetoscope. They were based Cilento 12 on the principle that Tom Gunning classified as “cinema of attractions,” which subordinated character and plot development to film form. As Charles Musser wrote discussing pre-narrative cinema: “It was not until 1907 that the system began to break down. This mode of representation was predominantly presentational in its acting style, set design, and visual composition as well as in its depiction of time, space, and narrative.
Actors…used highly conventionalized gestures to convey forceful emotions” (3).
Even YouTube comedians display a presentational style. However, the privilege of owning a channel allows Smith to perform within an environment that is more self- enclosed and self-referential. His skits are not isolated pieces of humor as those shot in the early silent era, but construct upon each other. Most of them take place in Smith’s apartment, a sort of Platonic cave in which the author confronts his own paranoid imagination. Shots are often drained of color, reinforcing the impression that videos represent a sort of deranged version of the comedian’s real life. The protagonists of these works are Smith himself, his fictional mentally impaired cousin Jeffery Dallas, and Mr.
Timn, a creep who randomly appears at people’s windows and dies at the end of each skit. Smith himself plays both Mr. Timn and Jeffery. He uses simple props like a pair of mustaches, glasses or a hat, following the tradition of early silent actors. For a period
Jeffery even had his own independent channel and a parallel YouTube existence.
Smith can be considered the first formalist in the realm of online comedy. The idea of adding a cinematic production value to the traditional roughness of YouTube skits is Smith’s main intuition and artistic contribution to digital humor in the 21st century.
Satire for him does not only lie in the display of the joke itself, but also in the audiovisual style through which it is expressed. Not by chance, he is considered the most ‘cinematic’ Cilento 13 of You Tube comedians, and famously shoots his clips with a RED Scarlet with different
Leica lenses. More recently he also took advantage of the lightweight and more maneuverable BlackMagic Pocket. His short sketches often homage not only silent stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, but also the dark humor and overdramatic style of contemporary directors such as Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Steven
Spielberg or Monty Python. In James Cameron My BFF, the comedian proposes himself as a cameraman in a staged interview for upcoming sequels by the director of
Terminator, Titanic and Avatar. Smith’s goal would be to help Cameron “raise the bar” of his cinematic productions. Self-ironies apart, Smith’s videos have a distinguished look that has been acquired over the years.14 When he began uploading videos on You Tube, his well-crafted and intricately composed images were far more polished than the rough shots produced by many of his peers. Only later, following his example, comedians raised the production value bar in their clips, a dynamic that allowed the online comedy language to evolve into something significant. For example, Freddie Wong’s early skits based on Guitar Hero were powerful but amateurish, despite the formal training he had received at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. However, his style has become more refined after he opened a media studio in Hollywood in partnership with YouTube. In numeric terms, Smith does not have as many subscribers and views as Wong or Johnson, but he remains the most skilled YouTuber in video production, thus a point of reference for whoever engages in the genre.
Although I have analyzed 25 Things and Julian Smith’s visual style in some detail, it is worth taking a more general look at the content of the skits. At first sight, the material of juliasmith87 may seem heterogeneous and dispersive, a collection of skits Cilento 14 staged by a young adult obsessed with the myth of online visibility. However, closer investigation reveals that a precise poetic has emerged over the years. The common denominator of many of these skits lies in the fact that they are based on the sudden transition between old and new media. The comic effect is often based on the consequent awkwardness that technological advancement creates in everyday communications.
Beginning with 25 Things, Smith staged his comedy characters as media-obsessed alienated individuals who create video skits for other teenagers/young adults experiencing similar issues. His short clips at times look like a desperate attempt to communicate with other human beings from the isolation of his studio apartment. In this context, Smith often exploits the online buzz around new technological items (or makes fun of how quickly the old ones became obsolete) in order to gain visibility, and is not the only comedian to use this strategy. iJustine’s first video to go viral was 300-Page iPhone
Bill, Rhett and Link shot The Facebook Song, Photoshop Song, and I’m a Textpert, Joe
Hanson The Beauty and the Geek, and Freddie Wong became a celebrity after Gamer
Commute. When it comes to Smith himself, this dynamic is not only present in 25 Things, but also in the successful Car Phone, Red Eye Flashes Twice and Buffering (in which
Smith displays his ability in rapping and singing), and in the most recent Wi-Fi, in which a group of nerds in a living room make no effort to communicate with each other in person but panic once they lose their online connection.
At this point Smith’s YouTube formula has been reconstructed and framed in its entirety. To summarize, Smith’s success is due to an innate commercial ability, and is animated by a willingness to spread his videos through various digital media platforms.
His visually polished skits based on the most updated technologies (or obsolete ones that Cilento 15 may serve as a counterpoint) and create ridiculous scenarios to people acquainted to the in-reference. It is not surprising then that his audience is young and mainly US based: a viewer who is not fully integrated in the videogame, social network and online hipster cultures, or one who does not drool over the latest gadgets advertised in Wired will not be able to appreciate Smith’s humor in the first place.
Personality Crisis
A recent documentary called Please Subscribe (Dan Dobi, 2012)15 has shown how successful YouTubers do not have a glamorous celebrity lifestyle, neither are they associated with fame’s sensationalism and prefabricated scandals. On the contrary, they are always on the edge of loneliness and melancholia. The most revealing moments of
Please Subscribe show how YouTubers spend most of their days in front of a glimpsing screen and a camera lens, caught in the perverse upload-or-die assembly line necessary to sustain their channels’ visibility. Nevertheless, these white collars of contemporary creativity always reiterate their open attitude toward new technologies (even when they frame their arguments negatively, as in 25 Things). A reliance on the machines is the price to pay in order to have access to an online existence that is more exciting and rewarding (in every sense) than their real lives. For it is digital technology that in the end allowed comedians to escape anonymity and an ordinary existence. At the same time, despite their current viral success, the artistic and economic future is volatile for most
YouTube comedians/entrepreneurs. Uncertainties are related to an impossible workload rhythm and especially to aging. Cilento 16
Despite his increasing popularity, it is becoming difficult for Smith to remain connected with the next online generation. If one monitors Smith’s activity over the last two years, it is evident that he has been struggling to constantly update his channel with new skits. In the clip 2014 (This Is a Pinecone), he responded to those fans that insistently kept asking him to upload material. He disclosed that he granted himself a pause to write a film screenplay and his first indie rock EP with the band B Story. This is another confirmation that, in analyzing Smith’s career, one must appreciate how it presents a complicated interplay of old and new media. This is not surprising if one precociously historicizes Smith and thinks that he grew up as an artist in the pivotal first decade of the 2000s. He is a comedian who managed to negotiate a new way of spreading humor online at a moment in which the entertainment business was being completely redesigned. Thus, he wisely took advantage of the digital environment to deliver his surreal skits, approaching it with irony and self-awareness. These days he aims to use his
YouTube fame as a Trojan horse, and he seems animated by a nostalgic desire to be re- integrated in the more traditional fields of film and the music industry. “Show me another picture / I just wanna remember what it was like back then” are the lyrics of his first EP single “Back Then.” The song laments loss of excitement, which is perhaps not directed to an alleged partner but toward himself and his teenage dream of being a film director or an alternative rock star. It may not be by chance that Smith is caressing old media fantasies in the moment in which he began to feel a generational gap with his younger fans. Although he is only twenty-seven, it has become harder for him to entertain young teenagers and adults in an environment whose commonly shared references and jargon are constantly shifting. Cilento 17
Fig. 1. Julian Smith & Travis Legg Watch Julian Smith
An astonishing admission of his limits is in the self-reflexive skit Julian Smith &
Travis Legg Watch Julian Smith (Fig. 1). This stylistically audacious piece is a voyage at the end of humor, shot in a two-hour single take, a work that reveals an existential crisis and challenges the short duration and new media easy consumption. The awkward situation it depicts is quickly explained: an elegantly dressed Smith is babysitting Travis
Legg, who, at age 23, is only four years younger than him. Legg needs to spend three days with his famous babysitter, waiting for his parents to come back. A still frontal shot shows them sitting on a basement couch. “Do you like to watch movies?” Smith asks. On their back, we see the light of a projector and we hear the audio from videos Smith has produced in the last few years (significantly the piece begins with the two watching 25
Things, continues with Inside Facebook, and covers most of Smith’s productions). This video is a summa of Smith’s career and came after a long period of silence. Obviously, it disconcerted many of his fans, since is the most “honest” and provocative video he ever Cilento 18 made, revealing an artistic impasse. The (carefully constructed) feeling of Julian Smith &
Travis Legg Watch Julian Smith is that of watching the last video that Smith will ever produce for YouTube, a sort of goodbye from an artist who is ready to move on to more important achievements at the peak of his online popularity. The whole project looks like a humorous adaptation of a German Kammerspiel from the 1920s, or a contemporary take on Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. The implacable camera is always pointed at the two spectators, and not at the screen showing the comedy skits, revealing that this work is all about reception. Legg’s performance is characterized by apathy and complete lack of reaction. He does not smile the whole time of the video, hates the feminized way in which Smith sings, and finds the incorporated ads in YouTube clips more entertaining than the comedian’s videos. The piece shows how YouTube references to new technology become immediately dated and how generational gaps are becoming shorter in the digital age. “Now they don’t call it a ‘wall,’ they call it a ‘timeline,’ so this is an outdated joke,” Smith comments to Inside Facebook, then he launches the next video stating: “This was the day that they announced the iPhone 3GS and we wrote it in real time. That night we put this up, we were the first ones to talk about it.” In the end, Smith admits to not liking one of his latest Christmas videos, saying he is going to take it down from YouTube. However, he states that he still loves 25 Things, and starts playing it again, and when the video finally ends it is implied that the whole cycle of screening may begin again and will continue for three days.
The unusually long video generated strong reaction and has almost 12,000 likes and 2,000 dislikes. Hardcore fans expressed sympathy to Smith and in the end enjoyed the director’s commentary and insights to his own videos. For example, Jasperi Wirtanen Cilento 19 commented: “I don’t understand how someone could watch his videos for two hours and pretend not to like them. He is a strong actor,” while James Minzy wrote: “How did
Travis keep a straight face for two hours?”. Others who engaged with watching the whole video remained deluded by if. JF Pickle said: “Oh dear. Take the challenge. See if you can last through this. I did. I lost two hours of my life,” and Jackson Wiesenmayer said:
“What was this? I mean, has helping Ray William Johnson make his videos messed with his head?” It must not be a coincidence that a few months after Julian Smith & Travis
Legg Watch Julian Smith, even the immensely successful Ray William Johnson had a similar identity crisis. He announced that the last episode of Equals 3 as himself the host would air on March 12, 2014. In a video podcast on Runaway Thoughts, that unnerved his subscribers, Johnson lends some insight into his reasoning: “Not only I am getting burnt out, but I feel like I need to move on. To put it into context, I’ll be thirty-three in
August. The show is a performance, but it feels immature. It’s not me anymore.” Like
Smith, Johnson decided to move away from the nightmare of repetition and the pressure of making comedy videos at a fast pace. He identified Robbie Motz as a new host to replace himself and continue the show’s legacy.
Whether these talented YouTubers of the first hour will find a way to deliver their creativity through new shows, refashion themselves in different formats, or keep repeating themselves is all to be seen. What can be established from an academic point of view, is that, galvanized by Julian Smith, many YouTube comedians/entrepreneurs pioneers have expressed similar issues and poetics. Their strategy consists in creating second-degree and self-reflexive humor not about some original topics of their creation, but about topics that are already viral to begin with, such as a new Transformers movie, Cilento 20 a new iPhone coming up, a change on Facebook interface, or the videogame Battlefield 3.
The phenomenon of Julian Smith, who in my opinion remains one the most seminal comedian/entrepreneurs, raised the bar for video artistry and production on YouTube and expressed maturity in evaluating his own career and digital presence. The only certain thing is that Smith is a still young entrepreneur who dynamically and increasingly shifts from starring in his own videos, to productions for other popular YouTubers, to screenwriter and front men of an alt-rock band, to director of corporate commercials.
Smith uses social media as a platform to promote himself as well as his ability to natively speak the language of digital media, which has established him as the pioneer of online humor in our current age, and a comedian who is getting serious about being funny.
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Works Cited
Apkon, Stephen. The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Print.
Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. Online Video and Participatory Culture. Oxford: Polity, 2009. Print.
Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010). Print.
Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago, 1999. Print.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print.
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013. Print.
Musser, Charles. The Emergence Of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Vol. 1. Oakland: University of California Press, 1994. Print.
Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attraction." Wide Angle 3.4 (1986): 1986. Print.
Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Our User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Print.
Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Print.
Prensky, Marc. "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants." On the Horizon 9.5 (October 2001): 1-6. Print.
Rose, Frank. The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. Print.
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Julian Smith Links
YouTube Comedy Channels
Blimey Cow < http://www.youtube.com/user/blimeycow>
Charlie Is So Cool < http://www.youtube.com/user/charlieissocoollike>
Conversations With My 2 Year Old
Daym Drops < http://www.youtube.com/user/GhettoNN>
Epic Meal Time
How It Should Have Ended (HISHE) < http://www.youtube.com/user/HISHEdotcom>
Juliansmith87 < http://www.youtube.com/user/juliansmith87>
Nigahiga
Ray William Johnson
Rhett and Link < http://www.youtube.com/user/RhettandLink>
Rocket Jump < http://www.youtube.com/rocketjump>
Screen Junkies
Smosh
The Fine Brothers
Zefrank1
Cilento 23
1 For more data, see Alexa Internet’s global traffic rank, which is calculated using a methodology that combines a site's estimated average of daily unique visitors and its estimated number of page views over the past three months,
he moved to Buffalo (NY), he launched his career as a comedian by producing the YouTube series Kidnapped, in which he is going to get killed if he doesn’t reach a thousand subscribers in five weeks (a goal that he actually met). Thus, when Smith shot 25 Things, he already had almost a decade of film production experience. For more details see Julian Smith’s interview on the podcast Ear Biscuits, host by his collaborators and peers Rhett and Link,