Social media is a goldmine for up-and-coming talent. It wasn't that long ago that Justin Bieber was discovered via YouTube, mind you. And just last week, an amateur comedienne, Sarah Cooper, was offered a Netflix special after going viral for her TikTok videos. That said, if you're not following the little guys, you're bound to miss out on the next big thing.
You can start with any of these funny guys. Eva Victor, Johnny Berchtold, Alyssa Limperis, Caleb Hearon, Benito Skinner and Nick Lehmann have all been around the block of social platforms a few times over. Hearon went viral recently for a series of videos in which he played a guy letting his co-worker in on the crazy weekend he had with Jonathan from marketing, in which each clip ended on a crazy cliffhanger and involved overbearing roommates and head injuries. Skinner is well-known on YouTube as Benny Drama, where he does spot-on impersonations and pristine personifications of the zodiac signs.
And Victor and Limperis are big on character bits, creating short point-of-view videos that are always perfectly on the nose -- you might recognize Limperis from her "Mom" videos.
And it's exactly this kind of bit that brought all these master talents together in the first place. Victor posted an 85-second video of "the girl from every movie who is 'different.'" Her character wore messy pigtail braids, sported a nose ring and choker and worked in a record store. She meets the quarterback of her school's football team, and (spoiler alert, but not really), they fall in ~love~ and unite for their happy ending at the prom.
Her fellow internet comedians, recognizing potential, swooped in to add their own POVs to the story, and the result is literally like watching a movie. It's the movie you've seen told in 12 different ways since the beginning of time, but it really never gets old.
"The Teen Romance You Already Know the Ending To," starring Victor as "Different Girl," Berchtold as "Quarterback," Limperis as "Popular Girlfriend," Hearon as "Wise Co-Worker," Skinner as "Gay Best Friend" and Lehmann as "Little Brother," in theaters...sometime soon, probably:
Even more Twitter users got into it, adding random characters here and there, including "Widowed Dad" and "Black Coworker They Only Let in the Scene for Five Seconds" -- one even offered to be "the beach" -- to turn one little comedy clip into a huge online community. Don't we love how the internet brings people together?
Now all we need is a director to sign on. Maybe Reese Witherspoon will executive produce?