Reverse Engineering Bad Luck Brian
On January 23rd, 2012, Ian Davies posted a yearbook photograph of a blonde teenage boy wearing a plaid sweater vest and braces with the caption “Takes driving test… Gets first DUI.” on Reddit. The post garnered 5 up votes within the day but the fate of the meme had much more in store — one Davies would not have imagined in his wildest dreams.
March 12th, a Redditor named Very_Juicy submitted the very same photo with the caption “Falls asleep in class… Wet dream” Within the week the post had received more than 2,900 upvotes and was also reposted onto 9gag, a humor site, where it received more than 48,000 likes within 24 hours. At this point Davies realized that the meme had grown into something so large he no longer had control over it. As the meme spread like wildfire, people began to caption the photo describing a variety of embarrassing and tragic occurrences. As of June 2012, the Quickmeme page has received more than 104,047 submissions on the meme and fans have gone as far to making Facebook pages for the character that hold roughly 50,000 followers. His face appeared on blogs, advertisements, paperweights, stuffed animals and t-shirts that were sold at Wal-Mart and Hop Topic. He’s been featured in ad campaigns for Volkswagen and RealPlayer and has been asked to be in advertisements in Germany, Chile, Poland and Puerto Rico. He’s been flown to Internet conventions across the country like VidCon and Indy Pop Con. This is the story of Bad Luck Brian.
The real identity of Bad Luck Brian is Kyle Craven who was an Ohio college student at the time his meme went viral. As the class clown in high school, 17 year-old Craven went to Value Village to purchase a vest, tossled his hair and posed for the camera, trying to smile a overly wide and enthusiastically. The principal, catching him on his prank, made him retake the picture a week later. That’s why for him it doesn’t bother him that the internet is making fun of his appearance since it was all intentional.
Craven has made roughly $20,000 off of Bad Luck Brian in three years. Obviously not enough to make a living but considering it has been through licensing deals and barely doing nothing, he’s pretty pleased. With such an overwhelming success of his meme, in order to keep the flame of his 15 minutes of flame longer he decided to turn to Youtube. The videos took hours to film and promote but had minimal response. Eventually his dedication to keep Bad Luck Brian alive faded and he took over his fathers business.
There is a reason why some memes work and others don’t. It’s like a viral video — it has to be unplanned in it’s success. The beauty of how the moment was captured at the right place at the right time, of how random but perfectly executed it is. You cannot replicate it’s success or try to outlive it’s viral lifespan. Just as Tamagotchi’s and Pokemon Go once lived it’s fad fantasy, memes live and then they die. Part of the success of the meme was that the whole idea of being a part of it was so simple and any misfortune even if it were wild and unimaginable could be possible for Bad Luck Brian. It created a community of it’s own. Whether you were 15 or 55, democrat or republican it was something everyone could laugh at.
Kyle Craven may not have asked for all of this fame based off of a character with such misfortune, however he says he is thankful of what this one picture has done for him and he loves being a meme. One fan he met told him “When my grandpa was sick, I always looked at Bad Luck Brian photos to make me laugh.” Not everyone can say that they once lived a life as an internet sensation and Craven now looks back at the time as a pleasant. Bad Luck Brian may not be so unlucky after all.
