From YouTube to Borat: The Jackass Generation :by Dave Roos

I don’t remember how or why I got there, but the fact is I clicked. After two hours on YouTube, you’re no longer responsible for your actions. Something primal takes over. The ancient need for distraction–Man’s Search for Funny.

The clip was called Molly Grows Up and was typical YouTube: Two dudes dug up an old, public domain, black-and-white “health class” movie about a prototypical ’50s teen coming to grips with puberty. Then they dubbed over the original dialogue with the sort of pseudo-stoner banter everyone recognizes as “bored, ironic hipster.”

I admit it was pretty funny. I even watched all two-and-a-half minutes of it (an eternity on YouTube). Nothing terribly original, but the pace was fast, the jokes mildly crude and the message clear: Eat more Wendy’s!

Eat more Wendy’s?

It turns out the clip in question wasn’t the product of two dudes in a basement in Bethesda, but 20 suits in a Madison Avenue high-rise. (On second viewing, they did mention Wendy’s 99¢ Super Value Menu more than could be reasonably explained by the munchies…) The whole thing–three YouTube clips and an equally low-rent Website–was whipped up by a division of McCann-Erickson, one of the world’s biggest advertising firms.

It’s called “Astroturf,” explains Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. “Fake grassroots media.” And its very existence begs an interesting question, says Jenkins. “What does it mean that we live in a world where very powerful players feel compelled to pass their work off as if it came from amateurs in order to get the attention that they think they might deserve?” It means that something strange has happened. Strange, but not entirely unexpected. Its influence is felt not only in advertising and marketing, but in every level of media and entertainment–from the lowest budget YouTuber to the most cash-bloated Hollywood movie studio.

The causes are many but the overall message is clear: If you want to reach this generation–especially if you want to make them laugh–keep it loose, keep it low-budget and keep it “real.”

Tom Lennon and Ben Garant have been doing their own weird thing for a long time. Original members of “The State” comedy troupe, the writing and acting duo also created “Viva Variety” for Comedy Central and “Reno 911!,” which is making the move to the big screen this February with Reno 911!: Miami. As smart and edgy as Lennon and Garant’s shows have been, nothing can make a couple of 35-year-olds sound like stale old greybeards faster than the subject of “Kids these days…”

The “Jackass” team, including Jason “Wee Man” Acuna and Johnny Knoxville, returns for Jeff Tremaine’s Jackass Number Two (2006)
“Kids are super smart and super critical and have a different type of aesthetic than we do,” says Garant, who plays dimwitted Deputy Travis Junior on “Reno 911!” “Kids that go to the movies these days never watched sitcoms. They see sitcom-scripted comedy and it feels like Shakespeare to them; it’s so artificial.”

When Garant talks about the “kids,” he’s referring to what we call “The Jackass Generation.” Raised on reality TV as the rule rather than the exception, they’ve been preconditioned to have, as Lennon puts it, “a very low tolerance for bullshit.” Dweebs like you and I may fall for the Wendy’s YouTube stunt, but not the Jackass Generation. The Molly Grows Up clip got a lot of hits, but just as many angry, anticorporate comments. The second and third clips Wendy’s uploaded simply sunk down into the digital dregs.

How Lennon and Garant get around the predictability of the traditional scripted sitcom or movie is, of course, to make up every line of dialogue as they go along. “The script for Reno 911!: Miami was really a 30-page outline,” says Lennon.

Obviously, they’re not the only ones in Hollywood to embrace improvisation. Will Ferrell and the “Frat Pack” crowd are famous for going “off book.” A movie like Ferrell’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, a Jackass Generation classic, is so packed with surreal comic moments one wonders if Ferrell and his writing partner, Adam McKay, even bothered with the outline. What the Frat Pack comedies do so well is use collective improvisation to sell the idea that here’s a group of friends–famous friends, sure, but regular guys at heart– who like to hang out, goof around and make each other laugh.

Seth Rogen, who had a small role in Anchorman, but starred alongside Steve Carell and Paul Rudd in The 40-Year- Old Virgin (which he also produced) and Owen Wilson in You, Me and Dupree, says audiences respond to that sort of comedy because it’s real. “That’s the most amazing part of the process. It really is fun and you really feel like you’re hanging out with your friends,” Rogen says.

Take the famous “Know how I know you’re gay?” scene from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where Rogen and Rudd question each other’s manhood during a PlayStation battle. “Paul Rudd and I actually are friends,” says Rogen. “When we’re talking it actually is just us trying to make each other laugh.” What does that mean for the Jackass Generation? It means that a kid like 21-year-old Dave Lehre in Washington, Michigan is encouraged to get together with his friends and do the exact same thing as the Ferrells, Carells and Rudds of the world–maybe even better.

Armed with cheap DV technology and fueled by abject boredom (“It’s either make movies or have some crazy house party in the woods,” says Lehre), Lehre and his buddies achieved YouTube stardom with MySpace, the Movie, a timely, satirical jab at the collective addiction of the Jackass Generation.

Garant and Lennon think that’s the biggest difference between themselves and the Jackass Generation. “When we were kids, there wasn’t a sense amongst us that ‘I could do better.’ We didn’ think that way,” says Garant. “Now they think, ‘Well, I’ll get a camera and I’ll put a skateboard on the roof and I can do better than “Reno 911!”‘” Maybe they’re right. Maybe they know something the rest of us don’t. Lehre signed a pilot deal with Fox (“The president of Fox’s son is a big fan of mine,” he explains) and just wrapped shooting in small-town Michigan. When he went out to L.A. to meet with studio execs, Lehre says, the suits were looking to him for advice.

“They’re trying to grasp onto something that’s taking flight faster than a rocket ship,” says Lehre. When he walked in and said he had a million hits on YouTube, they were flabbergasted. “‘How do you do it?’ they asked,” recalls Lehre. “Me and my friends just have fun. They’re like, ‘This doesn’ make any sense!’”

Mesh Flinders has been living with a 15- year-old girl in his head for longer than he’d care to remember. An aspiring moviemaker, Flinders has written “Bree” into three of his unproduced screenplays, but it took YouTube to bring her to life.

Flinders is the creator of LonelyGirl15, the teen video blogger whose cryptic Webcam diary continues to draw hundreds of thousands of hits–even after Bree was publicly unmasked as a professional actress.

What Flinders proved with the wild popularity of LonelyGirl15 is just how strong the lure of “reality” is to this generation. Even if they knew Bree was a little too good to be true, says Flinders, “People really wanted to believe in her.”

Sacha Baron Cohen and friend travel the country in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006).
Flinders credits some of the success of a movie like Borat to the fact that audiences buy into the moviemaker’s reality. “The audience is willing to suspend their disbelief, as long as you obey certain rules,” says Flinders. “Especially if you make it look like a documentary.”

The faux documentary technique is quickly becoming a staple of cutting-edge comedy. Jay Chandrasekhar, who writes for, acts in and directs all of the Broken Lizard comedies, including the cult hit Super Troopers and 2006’s Beerfest gained experience with the faux documentary style while directing a few episodes of “Arrested Development.”

“It just feels more naturalistic,” notes Chandrasekhar. “It feels more like real life. You get away with these jokes that are not really huge jokes on the page, and the audience is wondering, ‘Did they just make that up? Because that’s fucking brilliant.’”

“Reno 911!” is supposed to be a loose satire of “Cops,” so Garant and Lennon have always used a handheld camera to capture all the “real” action. But when they were filming the “Reno 911!” movie, they started second-guessing themselves, wondering if a “Cops” camera would go into people’s bedrooms and private conversations. But when they screened it, the audience didn’t blink. “It’s the way they expect to see things documented,” says Lennon. “A camera is seemingly always present.”

Aside from the obvious influence of reality TV, part of that expectation to see everything documented comes from the emerging YouTube “caught on tape” culture, says Jenkins. “We’ve all got cameras in our cell phones,” says Jenkins. When everyone everywhere has a camera all the time, everything’s fair game. “YouTube becomes an archival medium as a form of documenting culture.”

The other important quality of the faux documentary style is that it looks cheap. Jackass and Borat look and feel like do-it- yourself, guerilla moviemaking, even though they’re produced by major studies. For Jenkins, that makes Jackass and Borat prime examples of Hollywood “Astroturf.”

But like Flinders says, if the moviemakers play by all the rules and the audience buys into it, even the most expensive Astroturf can feel as real as the back yard. Broken Lizard’s Chandrasekhar is one of those audience members. “Borat is such an elegant movie in terms of [creating a reality],” he says. “What was written, what wasn’t, I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s just genius. They made it feel totally spontaneous.”

YouTube officially launched in December 2005. Less than a year later, Google bought it for $1.65 billion. How could such a simple idea–allowing people to post and share video clips–be so powerful?

“Every week we’re finding a new layer to what’s interesting about YouTube,” says Jenkins, whose most recent book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, explores, in part, how grassroots creativity affects mainstream media.

“Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen all this do-it-yourself media being made, but it’s all in these little niche corners of the Internet, where these groups are sort of hidden from each other,” says Jenkins. “Now they’re all thrown into YouTube as a sort of melting pot of grassroots creative expression and they’re learning stuff from each other very rapidly.”

In an article for Wired, Bob Garfield describes the ever-expanding YouTube community as the real-life equivalent of a million monkeys working at a million typewriters. What they’re coming up with certainly isn’t Shakespeare, but who cares?

Armed with cheap digital video technology and fueled by abject boredom, Dave Lehre and his buddies achieved YouTube stardom with MySpace, the Movie, a timely, satirical jab at the collective addiction of the Jackass Generation.
Think of YouTube as the world’s largest improv troupe. Just as all the great sketch comedians honed their skills and developed fresh ideas on the stages of “Saturday Night Live,” The Groundlings and Second City, the Jackass Generation is doing the same on YouTube, only to the 10th power. The comedy terrain shifts so quickly on YouTube (“old school” can mean last week), that the culture is continuously redefining “What’s funny this second.”

Jenkins provides an even more appropriate comparison: YouTube as 21st-century vaudeville. “Vaudeville was composed of very short acts, each very different material juxtaposed against each other,” explains Jenkins. “A lot of creative control in the hands of individual performers–a tendency to focus on shock, emotion, fascination with machinery and technological devices… bringing the world together on the same stage. In a sense, all of that describes YouTube very well.”

Of course, early Hollywood relied on a steady stream of performers who had made names for themselves on the vaudeville circuit. Not surprisingly, there has been tremendous buzz over studios possibly turning to YouTube for the next crop of fresh moviemakers.

“It’s kind of like the 1970s again,” says LonelyGirl15 creator Flinders, “when the cultural revolution took place and the studios went and hired all these ‘Young Turk’ filmmakers–Scorsese, Fellini, Coppola– and let them come in and help with big studio pictures. Hopefully that’s going to happen now.”

Flinders, who describes himself as a moviemaker, says he’s ready to make the transition from the Internet to the big screen. “People like me, who have done stuff on YouTube, are getting representation and getting in a door that wasn’t open less than even a year ago,” he says.

Tom Nunan, a film and TV producer (Crash, The Illusionist) who also teaches a combined course at UCLA for graduate film students and MBA candidates, says if your goal is to eventually make a lot of money in the mainstream, YouTube is a completely viable auditioning platform.

“All of the broadcast and cable networks are all over YouTube, trolling for new voices and new talent. It is absolutely a legitimate space for new filmmakers–or old filmmakers who want to reinvent themselves to prove their ground,” says Nunan. “People use it in pitches: ‘I’ve received 75,000 hits.’ And why wouldn’t they?”

Joe Bereta and Luke Barats just signed a pilot deal with NBC after their sketch comedy clips blew up on YouTube (Variety recently included the duo in their 2006 Comedy Impact List). Barats doesn’t think he and Bereta possess unusual talent, it’s just that YouTube has given them the distribution method to get their stuff out there.

“We”re young writers who have gotten a chance to see their stuff produced because we did it ourselves,” says Barats. “I think that’s the reason we’re in the room as opposed to some other young writer who hasn’t gotten his stuff exposed quite as much.”

For film critic and historian (and MovieMaker writer) Joe Leydon, the cross-pollination of Hollywood and YouTube is only natural. He calls the DIY clips on YouTube “the cinematic equivalent of garage band recordings. Just as there will be elements of garage bands that will be incorporated into mainstream music, there will also be garage bands signed to recording contracts with major labels,” says Leydon.

“I’m sure that some of the people who will be releasing summer comedies in 2008 are making little comedy shorts for display right now on YouTube.”

Lennon jokes that Reno 911!: Miami is really nothing more than big screen YouTube. “It’s shot with handheld video, sometimes it’s out of focus and every three minutes something either very violent or very sexy happens, which is generally exactly what YouTube is,” says Lennon. “I don’t know if we would admit that or are aware of it, but we’re certainly doing it.”

© 2008 MovieMaker Magazine