YouTube Poop.
Let’s take any old video – a TV show, a commercial, a public speech – and let’s digitally edit it so that the clip becomes as nonsensical, vulgar, and ultimately hilarious as possible. That is the essence of YouTube Poop. As ubiquitous as that may sound though, YouTube Poop seemed to have hit its peak in the earlier days of YouTube, and certainly not a trending prospect in the 2020s, perhaps due to them seeming immature or outdated by today’s standards of internet humour.
However, some still dare to create YouTube Poops whether because it’s what they’re known for (like cs188) or because they just love doing it. And quite recently, a smallish channel known as “very tall bart” (will refer to as TallBart from now on) has caught my attention. While not quite a big channel, his YTPs seemed to have a distinctly new style that reveled in simplicity – not overusing effects, and structuring them as if they were comedy routines, rather than the overdone vulgarity spam of the past. As well, the subjects of the YTPs are almost exclusively conservative figureheads like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. His politics are clearly biased to the left – even inserting content warnings and adding subtitles for accessibility despite the very surrealist humour style.
Amongst the sea of YTPs is a video called “How To Be Funny Online”. It’s… surprisingly unpopular for how entertaining yet succinct and provoking it is, sitting at only about 25,000 views while his most popular YTPs easily clear 300,000. I had to watch it over and over again to piece all the bits together and really figure out what he’s saying. I’m no philosophy major and I’m not well versed in Aristotle or Kant, but I have laughed before and would like to think that I’ve made other people laugh. Which is kind of rich given that my tone in these articles is generally kinda serious and honestly not that funny to read.
The video goes by extremely quickly and is broken up into various chunks, so it’s good to go through them one by one and offer my thoughts and commentary on them:
We start off with an exposition on 9/11 jokes, accompanied by an edit of a Biden rally transitioning seamlessly into an ironic CoD edit straight out of the mid-2000s. I laughed, but hey wait isn’t this intro supposed to be about 9/11 jokes? Why this particular gag? I think TallBart is trying to show us an example of a short clip intended to make the audience laugh, in order to facilitate the discussion that follows. We know that we are coupling a sentiment, namely the excitement of Joe Biden yelling to a crowd about random US states, with the unexpected punchline that it is a buildup to a compilation of sick quickscopes, both being contrary to expectations but also allowing the viewer to make the connection that old CoD editors would use random yelling clips as an instrument of hype in their videos.
So why was that clip funny? What even is humour?
Since humour has been a cornerstone of human existence for basically all of written history, we’re given an extremely brief introduction into the viewpoints of two influential philosophers, Aristotle and Kant. The video speaks for itself, but essentially Aristotle postulated that humour is an assertion of superiority over those we see as beneath us, by imitating them. Kant says that things are funny when the mind is presented with ideas that don’t make sense together – an incongruity.
Applying this to the Biden clip, we could say that we are making fun of people who make (or made) edgy CoD edits by imitating their style but using a completely inappropriate hype clip. Or it could be poking at Biden, whose over-the-top rally cry would fit more in a CoD video than in politics. If we think through incongruity, of course the two clips are incongruous with each other; they could not be more different. But they also seem to suggest to the viewer that they have some kind of connection, which they shouldn’t. Funny.
To conclude the first half of the video, it circles back to 9/11. Why are 9/11 jokes funny, if it was such a huge national tragedy? TallBart tries to apply the theories in the video, but the problem with this (and the Biden clip) is that both theories can be interpreted as true in this case – and in most cases of humour. Are we making fun of 9/11 victims, or are we making fun of people who would make fun of 9/11 victims? Or are we laughing at the perceived gap between the action of laughter and the notion of a huge tragedy? While only two theories of humour are explored here, TallBart implies that no matter what theories you try to use, the action of attempting to analyze it is what renders one unable to learn to be funny on the Internet. All that matters is that comedy is what makes you laugh, and what makes you laugh is comedy – the “circular definition”. Or maybe comedy is what you see other people laughing at, which shapes your view of what is and isn’t funny. Bottom line is: the cause of someone laughing can’t be defined concretely in any given case, especially 9/11 jokes or the Biden clip, so don’t bother with it.
The second half is what I like to interpret as the practical half of the video. It gives various pieces of advice through examples, though it is a bit convoluted at points.
The bread and butter of TallBart’s YouTube Poops is making whatever pundit he’s editing say “I’m gay”. In the following segment, he does a “Poop Academy” lesson in which he teaches you how to make Jordan Peterson say “I’m gay”. Taken literally, TallBart is teaching you how to be funny just like him. However, on a deeper level, while he talks through the technical details of the process, notice how none of his commentary revolves around why it’s funny. Even at the end, he says “make sure to click the ‘funny’ button to make sure the joke lands.” He himself doesn’t know whether it actually is funny or not, just that it made him laugh – and in reality, even with all sorts of editing skills and video techniques, there is still no guarantee that any given joke will be seen as funny.
He then abruptly cuts to his own commentary on Bo Burnham, specifically about how he needed to change the direction of his comedy to make fun of himself rather than people that are seen as inferior – hence, a departure from the Aristotelian sense of comedy. However, TallBart gives the opinion that the direction he took – to make fun of himself rather than others – isn’t funny because he’s so self-aware that he no longer has dignity to lose. Audiences like it more when the joke lands on someone who is seen as a stronger figure, someone respected, something sacred. That’s why 9/11 jokes make people laugh. That’s why to be funny online these days, it’s no longer about insulting those beneath you (i.e. through racist, sexist, or otherwise reductive humour). Nor is it about beating a dead horse, even if that horse is yourself. Hence, TallBart likes to turn egoistic, seemingly strong figureheads into nonsense as his interpretation of how to properly make fun of someone. That’s why it’s funny to hear Jordan Peterson, a (homophobic) person that many (might I say misguided) people tout as a great modern philosopher, say “I’m gay”. And as he shows in this segment, you can too!
The last segment seemed a bit like an added corollary. His fake comedy-skit can really be summed up in the final sentence of the video – know your audience! I think he is pointing mostly to the language that people use – since he’s in the young “BreadTube” left-ish part of the web, it wouldn’t seem funny for him to be throwing around terms often used by older or right-wing people, unless in a clearly ironic setting. His YTPs are made for people who value inclusivity, hence his use of content warnings and accessibility even in videos that are meant to be pure don’t-give-a-fuck comedy. If you want to represent a community’s sense of humour, you should know them well enough to know what they value.
I don’t like to think I’m very funny (online), but at least I like to laugh a lot, and this video gives a pretty optimistic outlook on the relationship between content and comedy. I really hope many others can see this video for how eloquent, brief, and genuinely funny it is with all the small jokes it sprinkles in with the main point. And I also hope to see plenty more Penis Prager and Lobster Boy edits.
The Vault Publication 