Chris Crocker defends Britney Spears while Tom Guarriello explains how Crocker memes spread through YouTube creators. Caricature distorts one feature into a total identity, works like a smiley face, but burns out fast because it lacks nuance.
And how fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Brittany after all she's been through. She lost her aunt, she went through a divorce, she had two fucking kids, her husband turned out to be a user, and she—
Hey guys, it's Tom. Um, Chris Crocker. So there's been a lot of, uh, a lot of real breathlessness here on YouTube, uh, over the last 10 days or so about Chris Crocker. And then it kind of spread, and, and the breathlessness spread a little bit. It spread, um, uh, Renetto helped it to spread, right, with his gay video and, you know, all the Chris Crocker parody videos. And, you know, it got— I mean, this is the kind— and Chris Crocker, you know, 8 million views, a TV contract. I mean, it might be with a, as Blunty puts it, some no-name production company, but, you know, it is a TV contract. And, you know, now there's— what's going on? What is going on? Well, um, here's what I think's going on. You know, um, every distinguishable group that's ever lived on Earth has been parodied in one way or another. Um, you know, and parodies are caricatures, right? I mean, a caricature is taking a particular feature of an individual, or in these cases of groups, and distorting them. Caricatures are distortions, right? I remember when I was a kid, I'm Italian, you know, there was a television commercial for some kind of spaghetti sauce or some such thing. And in the commercial they had a guy who kept saying, "Ah, that's a spicy spicy meatball. That's a spicy speasy meatball." And it was, uh, it was a caricature. It was a caricature. It pissed me off as a caricature because caricatures are totalizing. What, what they do is they take a little piece of something, in this case camp in the, uh, in the world of gay culture, and blow it up into a total representation of the individual or the group. And it makes it— the caricature becomes a shorthand, right? And a shorthand then eventually becomes a way for a referent. You know, we can refer to the whole group, you know, with a limp wrist, or we can refer to the whole group with a "spies is pies im Mietbau," or we can refer to the whole group with, you know, 'Yes, Mr. Benny,' you know, that was Rochester back in the '50s, was a caricature of a Black man, and he, and he totalized himself with that caricature. But that's what caricatures do. Now, it's easy to get wrapped around the axle about caricatures and become infuriated with them. I saw that, uh, you know, there have been a couple of, of thoughtful videos, uh, by gay men here on YouTube. Zipster, uh, Zipster's was very funny. I actually, that was, you know, my beginning was a little, uh, uh, I was, uh, uh, giving a little, a little hat tip to Zipster with the way I began my video there, the way he started his video about Renetto's video. Uh, Bray Shizzle yesterday made a video in which he said, I don't want to— just as Zipster had said, saying, I don't want to be reduced to this caricature. I don't want my life to become a cartoon, which is what caricatures are, right? Cartoons. But the fact is that from the beginning of time, we have always had cartoons and caricatures, and there is something As we try to zoom out, kind of dolly out on individuals or on groups, we try to get to the most recognizable features. And the more recognizable the feature becomes, the less detail, of course, it has and the less specificity about any particular individual. And, and this is a technique that cartoonists use all the time in order to express emotion. The interesting thing about cartoons is that the less detail there is in the cartoon, the more clearly it depicts emotion. Think about the smiley face. The smiley face is a universal attempt at depicting human emotion. There's no specificity. It's a round— it's a round yellow face with a smile gesture, you know, swoop in the middle of it, and yet it is a kind of a universal symbol of the smile. Caricatures are like that, and I think what we have to do is to recognize that caricatures are— number one, they are very popular, and in the sense because they're easy to grasp. There's no— you don't have to have any— there's no subtlety involved in trying to understand what it is that Chris Crocker is trying to portray. He's trying to portray a caricature, so it's easy to understand. Secondly, caricatures get old really quickly. There's no nuance, there's no complexity, and therefore very little interest in caricatures. So We have a caricature now that's kind of going through the YouTube world. This meme, this, this kind of, you know, this idea is going through the YouTube universe at the moment, and it'll pass through quickly because there's not much to it, and there's not much that's going to really keep people's interest beyond a very short time. So that's my two cents on the Chris Crocker meme and what's going on in regard to caricatures here.
I'm gonna go back and finish listening to the story about poor Britney.
Take it easy, I'll see you soon.
