Somewhere in the dim recesses of the 200,000 hit videos of YouTube is an advert for a new comedy channel. Launched this week, Jash is the team effort of comedians Michael Cera, Sarah Silverman, Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and Reggie Watts. It promises, according to Wareheim’s comments in Rolling Stone, to be a ‘bullshit-free experience’. The group got together after Google, the parent company of YouTube, proposed they produce proper comedy for a proper comedy channel on YouTube. Google was finally sick of the spate of viral videos that have dominated the site in recent years.
This is a fair point: if you look at some of the most popular videos of 2012 and 2013 so far, there has been a decline in constructed or performed comedy. The humour is derived from novelty, more often than not. Gangam Style, for example, is inescapable simply because it is a relatively catchy Korean pop song with a silly dance. The same goes for Harlem Shake. And another thing: the South Carolina competitor for the 2007 Miss Teen USA became an overnight YouTube sensation, infamous for her idiocy. When asked why she thought a fifth of American cannot locate themselves on a map, she replied with the immortal words: ‘I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because some people out there don’t have maps and some of our education such as South Africa and Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the US, should help South Africa’. Should we laugh at her stupidity and tragic lack of clarity? Yes, fifty seven million other people are. But they aren’t laughing at Sarah Silverman.
In a culture that favours videos of cats attacking printers and dogs on skateboards, is there room for channels like Jash? It is not unheard of for people to maximise YouTube’ viral capacity to increase their coverage. The song ‘Here it goes again’, written by the relatively awful Californian band OK Go, reached over a million YouTube views in the six days following its release in July 2006. Why? Because the video was choreographed on treadmills. They are a relatively dull quartet, and have since sunk back into obscurity, but this video’s viral success won them a Grammy award. It now has over fifty two million hits, making it the 42nd most viewed YouTube video of all time. This is all very well, but can we apply the viral sensation to a constructed comedy channel? This is not what we have come to expect from YouTube, and the risk of failure is high.
Off the back of the promotion videos, I have very little faith in it working. The advert starts with the president of Google walking down an expensive office corridor proclaiming, with his sickening CEO smile, that he is going to delete the entire content of YouTube and replace it with Jash. We then proceed through a series of categorically unfunny scenes: watching the new videos being made, before ending with a song about Jash by a band called Piss Cup, who vaguely resemble the Cure, and not in a good way. An unconvincing start to an unconvincing idea. Ignoring the idiots who have commented below the video that they cannot bear for YouTube to be deleted, the general response is not overwhelming. Most seem at best unimpressed, and at worst actively campaigning for the safety of YouTube.
We can’t by any stretch of the imagination rule out the need for genuine comedy today, performed and produced by comic actors. People like Judd Apatow have championed this to great effect. However, what Jash’s campaign demonstrates is that YouTube’s popular culture thrives off framing people and novelty factor. It isn’t television, it’s an exposition of some of the most awful and brilliant moments of recent years by popular demand. If Jash is going to work, it’s going to have to be really, consistently, pant-wettingly funny.
