Watching a surprisingly good Adam Sandler film last week (I can’t believe it either) I saw a very astute and funny scene about YouTube. The film is centered around a group of young stand up comedians trying to make it big. As such, all of them see YouTube as a channel to help showcase their abilities to the masses. One comic cunningly disguises his stand up material under a more popular search title of ‘Kittens’ so that, to the detriment of the viewer, they will be shown random, interjecting clips of his material while the kitten footage is being streamed.

YouTube: an incredibly democratic form of Social Media

Although sounding half baked, the comic maintains that it had received ‘700,000 hits within 3 days’ and that the link provided in his stand up footage was migrating scores of people to his website. This is then promptly followed by a response from his friend that is fairly unprintable in the context of this site…

While obviously the scene is made to be a satirical take on YouTube, examples of high video views have reaffirmed my belief that outside mainstream video content (highlights of produced movie, music and TV clips) often the most abysmal or mundane content is getting the lion’s share of views. Having said this there’s also lots to be envious of too.

On the subject of abysmal, if you’re at all curious as to what the product of incest from within the Manson family would look like, check out TV Shot to Death. The premise is that a redneck American made a bet with his other redneck mates that his NFL team would not lose to the value of his mates being able to blast his large flat screen TV away with guns if it happened. As you can imagine, the guy lost the fight but won the war, attaining over 650,000 views within a week’s time following the footage of the affair going to YouTube. Although there is not much dialogue (apart from just about every Hick in the clip shouting “Who Dat?” repeatedly) it’s such a depressing five minutes of footage that it almost makes it unmissable. Just watch the clip and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, I like kids just as much as the next guy. Nonetheless I can’t understand how another baby biting the finger of another in Charlie Bit My Finger can amass over 146 million views. Many will disagree, and, tastes aside, I take my hat off to the creators, but I can’t extend the same courtesy to the father of David in David After Dentist. This video collected 45 million hits and documented a 7 year old boy confused after the anesthetic takes hold of him following his trip to the dentist. An opportunistic father or a child actor exceeding his years talent? Given that the father has now set up a website and is trying to flog t-shirts to people who now go to watch the footage, I’m pretty certain it’s a case of the former. To me, this is a bit like raunchy dancing with a sibling; it’s not strictly illegal but it probably should be.

Despite YouTube hosting an overwhelming amount of arguable entertainment, one of the highlights of the channel is its ability to pull artists – who undeniably possess talent – from obscurity. For me Brandon Hardesty is one of them. Having an obvious love for movies, he reenacted over thirty scenes from some of the biggest films, while he worked by day as a cashier. Joe Pesci’s producer one day happened to be searching for Goodfellas impersonations and found his uncanny impression sending him a script for the film he now stars alongside with William H Macy. Quite simply, it’s a modern fairytale not dissimilar to Susan Boyle, Cody Simpson, Lauren Luke and, (unfortunately) Natalie Tran.

Ultimately YouTube’s strength is in allowing anyone to provide online videos to anyone else that’s prepared to view them. Like the internet itself, this comes at a cost of being clogged up with garbage (incidentally YouTubing ‘shooting a TV’ will bring up more than twenty results).

But as they say: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. So who am I to determine just what the garbage is?

Tags: Adam Sandler, Brandon Hardesty, Charlie bit my finger, David after dentist, Funny people, TV shot to death, YouTube

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.