The YouTube Poop: From Fertilization to Defecation
YouTube as a platform has proved to be, in a sense, a breeding ground for off-kilter, deep fried comedy. It’s a garden for internet memes to be planted, cultivated, processed, eaten, digested, and finally defecated. The last step of which usually proves to be the end of the road for most organic material, but not in the case of web memestock. They find their new homes in a digested, processed cluster of digital age content, mixed and mashed and generated (often through Sony Vegas Pro) into an entirely new internet entity categorized under: YouTube Poop.
There’s plenty of different names and examples of what creates a YouTube Poop. But they all usually share the same basic format. A YTP is composed of a larger piece of entertainment, be it an episode of Spongebob, a Pixar movie, or a presidential debate, which is then cut, crossed, sewed, and spliced with different jokes, audio cues, memes, visual gags, etc.. The final product is usually a 3–7 minute (give or take) piece of postmodern chaos.
I worry I may be selling short the level of craft mastery that goes into composing such content. The YouTube Poop, when done well, is somewhat of a masterpiece. The editor of the piece puts hours on hours into twisting the cinematography, dialogue, timing, and narrative of the selected piece of original content until they’ve created something entirely new. YTPs such as “The Misadventures of Skooks” (2011), “The UNcredibles” (2013), and “Hank of the Hill” (20??) are visual wonders that churn out jokes left and right and play with the network media-approved format of entertainment until they’ve made something can really only exist on a timeline past 2005.
We’ve noticed a common theme in recent years of media just being made of other media. The number of examples is innumerable, but what makes these videos so remarkable is their ability and potential to cram so much content from various sources into one clip. Or make an entirely self-contained piece of entertainment that doesn’t use outside content to layer on top of the original source, while still flipping the narrative on its head. It’s something that can’t be understood without viewing. And viewing doesn’t do it justice without context. Context of which can’t be well-understood without growing up as a child who played in the garden of memes. It’s niche and specific and wild, but to a person who knows the references, these joke-fires are truly sights to behold and critique.
Living in a remix, revisionist culture, we’re no strangers to seeing scripts and rhythms reconfigured and reproduced. Over half the movies we see advertised are modern adaptations of classic stories told via different mediums. We’re used to it. And there’s little problem with it other than a lack of creativity. But something worth appreciating about these videos is that it doesn’t rely on the same plot told with better visuals and our current favorite actors. A good YTP takes a piece of content we’re familiar with and crafts a new timeline using old footage. I wouldn’t make a claim that this sets them at a higher level of craft above “It: Chapter 2”, but I would argue that the artform deserves a headnod for remixing something different in a world so saturated with stories to which we already know the endings.
It’s somewhat of a refreshing medium. The last three movies I’ve seen in theaters I’ve known the resolution of before I enter the theater. That’s what happens when you watch Disney remakes. And while it retains a certain “Wow” factor, there’s significantly less surprise. And considering the amount of production value that comes with a big budget blockbuster in the digital age, it’s kind of crazy to think that one could walk out of a movie like that and not be fulfilled in a way that comes with feeling a genuine level of surprise or misdirection. I’d argue that you get that feeling by the end of any YouTube Poop. They’re predictable in that the format will aim to surprise you with whatever the joke is and you know something’s coming. But it can be anything from a dialogue swap to a visual glitch, to a completely different narrative.
In the first twenty seconds of Jed Honour’s “YTP — You on Kazoo!” We’re presented with the title screen of the original video with the original voiceover audio that says “You! On… KAZOO!” But after the “You!”, the screen bugs out and the title is distorted for the “On…”, and the “KAZOO!” is replaced with Bill Cosby’s “KOO KOO KATCHOO!!” quote with an old Cosby’s face bouncing off the corners of the screen. Kazoo kid is then in the backyard with his friends, where he greets us. His pals dance in the background and for every greeting they give, their hello’s are replaced with grunts and growls and they each get a distorted close up. After the third child greets us, his image is lifted off the ground and he flies into the sky. During the frame after, while Kazoo Kid backs toward the camera, a clip art speaker creeps into frame from the bottom left corner when our protagonist gets too close to the camera and audio blasts him while the colors are distorted five times in a quarter of a second. This is what six million people were gasping with laughter at and considering normal content in August, 2016.
For almost a decade and a half, YouTube Poops have remained in their own quiet corner of the video sharing supersite (where they belong). But they’ve been subverting expectations and surprising viewers since 2005. And they breathe a different kind of life into the digital video sharing landscape in a world of media that we can already predict. It’s an exciting superplant that grows all on its own in the garden of memes that undergoes new molecular changes everyday, and it’s been an honor to watch each one be consumed, digested, and defecated.
