The internet is a double-edged sword. If it was a town, it would be Basin City because walk down the right darkened alleyway and you can find anything.
But one site changed everything. You no longer had to spend some time ankle-deep in human waste, searching furtively behind bins and boarded up shopfronts to find the more fucked-up goings-on because the advent of Youtube meant you could wander into the biggest town square and find the lion's share of the entire populace engaged in passionate amateur street theatre. Mostly pertaining to cats and groin impacts.
Every once in a while though, a bright, fresh-faced young talent would emerge and failing that, the now almost eight-year old video sharing site could be relied upon for some easy laughs in bite-sized morsels but here's the thing: When you give every fetal alcohol syndrome survivor with access to filming, green screen and auto-tune equipment the ability to publicly broadcast you have absolutely no right to complain when they biblically flood your servers with cultural vomit.
Every retard with a messiah complex growing up in an area with more modern trappings than the dark side of Mars seems unable to resist the allure of webcam vlogging and film production and in the absence of any real quality control, there are now more videos of people being generally awful than there are people in the world.
It's kind of inevitable when you think about it. We trust the cream to rise to the top but it's we, the public, who are in charge of rating and publicising everything. And people are, in most cases, tasteless, ignorant cretins without a shadow of critical wit and it's comedy where this shines out the most blindingly.
Yes it's largely subjective, yes it's difficult to qualify but the mere fact that people make comedy that invokes not a sense of mirth, but an overwhelming impulse to punch their nostrils out of the back of their skulls so they deploy like tiny, wee airbags should be a clear sign of failure on their part, not ours.
Of course that won't stop these pioneers in terribleness raking in millions of views, proud, erect green lightsabers and of course the sweet, sweet ad money. If this is starting to sound like it was motivated by bilious envy, it's because it was.
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Real name: Jenna Marbles
Realer name: Turnatrick Cockstopper
Subscribers: 6,226,503
Total views: 955,576,207
Worst offence: How to trick people into thinking you're good looking
Also lodged in there (behind the chestplate), bizarrely enough, is a powerful yearning to impart wisdom upon the tragic millions of viewers aching for guidance and guys looking for something to masturbate to that talks back at them.
Real name: Smosh
Realer name: Backpack Smashvag & Codey Cakely
Subscribers: 7,214,204
Total views: 2,069,878,44
Latest offence: WE'RE IN SUPER MARIO!
And this the absolute worst kind of comedic pandering to the absolute worst kind of audience. You wouldn't call any of it parody, it's just a series of references and pokey logic gags that anyone with slightly more processing power than lukewarm cake batter between the ears picked up as they were actually playing. It's t-shirt slogan comedy spread out into tortuous three minute videos.
Oh, you too noticed that Mario's status as a hero is slightly dubious considering he murderously headstomps his way from A to B through an entire ecology just trying to get from B to A? And has no-one stopped to think whether Peach might be happier spreading her legs for Bowser? Also, the cake was a liieeeeeee!!
It requires as much energy as a solar-powered black dildo belonging to a Floridian puritan. But it could almost be bearable. In different formats referential video game comedy can be alright, like the occasional webcomic, but any reverence Smosh might have for their subject matter is utterly undermined by their interminable unlikeability, having concentrated obnoxious-ness into some kind of quantum singularity -- viciously sucking all potential laughs into a dimension populated entirely by douchecopters in wide-brim caps groaning, 'duuuude, what if the cake wasn't a lie?'
Real name: Nigahiga
Realer name: Flaily Spazzhammer (AKA: Nigel Hi-gel)
Subscribers: 6,801,589
Total views: 1,434,338,167
Latest offence: Best Super Bowl Commercial!
But you can see how years of producing bedroom budget, absurdist shit has laden this kid with the haughtiest of airs. His recent videos now watch like convoluted meta-sketches so far up their own arses they're one sharp tug from being inside out.
Real name: Shane Dawson
Realer name: Gargle Faghag
Subscribers: 3,260,251
Total views: 798,164,049
Worst offence: Fred is dead
Opening a vlog by telling the world that there's no way you could ever hope to match the creative genius of late term abortion and movie star, Fred, is like turning up to your first day at medical school loudly announcing that your inspiration was Harold Shipman.
All Fred had was a seemingly endless supply of nitrous oxide and the revelation of where fast-forward was on his webcam's video editor. It's not like his content was up to much, it was just a bunch of madlibs about his dick-repellent medication and mother. Don't pretend that was an original notion, kid. Eminem was bitching about his mother back when you were just a cyst on the ovaries of yours.
There's no point harping on about what a stain Fred was on the zeitgeist because thankfully he's kind of evaporated into the ether. And on the internet, that basically is as good as overdosing in a motel room with your belt around your throat. What bothers me is that Shane Dawson feels the need to venerate his memory. Because when you've been abandoned by a deadbeat father, you don't build a shrine to him.
Real name: The Angry Joe Show
Realer name: Hormonal Ragedump
Subscribers: 434,638
Total views: 64,330,944
Worst offence: DmC: Devil May Cry Angry Review
What's this? Another video game-related show? Will, you jaded misanthrope with delusions of eloquence, you just don't like humour that makes light of your most beloved of mediums.
Firstly, I would say that your use of 'delusion' is incorrect and second, let me tell you about being a dick on the internet. Executing a sweet burn against a product or person you feel deserves it (however entrenched in your industry of choice) is empowering. Fondling the egotistical vision you have of yourself lounging on an obsidian throne, feet resting on a pile of skulls, sipping a martini with one hand and casually ashing out a cigarette on the up-turned palm of a nubile sex slave with the other. Although that might just be me. It's deliriously satisfying and now the only way I can achieve an erection.
All nerds have some kind of power fantasy but differ in how moral it is. Saving the world snags you pussy but plotting its dominion is actually fun so its a tougher choice than just Kirk or Pichard. More like Dark Elf or regular, fey, pan-sexual elf. Most throw their lot in with evil for the aforementioned fun but without the influence IRL to commission the Death Fortress just off the coast of Papau New Guinea with the aforementioned archvillain school of interior design and the rivers of lava plummeting from the eyes, our kind generally flock to internet figureheads with the most obscene critical vocabulary.
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| Seen here, kindly designed by some absolute schlub on Minecraft. |
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| Tell me you hate me. Please. Just once, I want to know how it feels. |
Case in point: Ninja Theory bucked the more cynical assumptions by rebooting Devil May Cry and not fucking it up. They kept all the sword-swinging, bullet-juggling fun and trimmed all the bollock-stroking narcissism in favour of a Dante that only starts out being an obnoxious prick but grows to show some maturity and attachment to people that weren't studiously sucking him off. Of course, the internet interpreted that as 'DmC is emo as all shit' and started the critical equivalent of throwing their faeces at the walls until someone started paying them attention.
Naturally, Angry Joe did and begins his review of DmC by showing a music video by a glam-rock band that look and sound like Brokencyde were raped by costume designers* and comparing it to the content of the game. He's then perplexingly stupid enough to point out that this is the opinion of one, solitary consumer review whose pretty open about their distaste for the series as a whole. Joe then, seeing as he's apparently immune to the forces of irony goes on to say (read: intermittently yell) that there's no need to get uppity, internet, the game isn't that bad.
Do the world a favour and jump off a bridge you cancerous, Ewok fuck. Don't laugh. It isn't funny. I seriously fucking hate this creature.
*I have resolutely decided to like this band**, who seriously, presumably, call themselves Blood on the Dance Floor with a straight face, because hopefully mentioning them here will get them a few hits and the abject horror on Angry Joe's face at the thought that they might challenge his reign (because his is the kind that measures their entire worth as humans by monthly pageviews) is rapidly becoming my favourite thing to think about during sex. Round my way, they call that fucking revenge.
**You know what's especially depressing about all this? I had all these vids open in tabs and the only one I didn't rush to close once I was done like a Catholic masturbating belonged to a band called Blood on the fucking Dance Floor? Maybe I really am in no position to judge.
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