Dude makes a living posting funny videos
Think you’re funny? Try getting in front of a camera and making strangers laugh on the very crowded internet.
Gus Johnson is doing it every few days, and sometimes millions of people watch his videos.
Like “Every Cat at 3 AM.” That’s his grand champ so far at 3.2 million views. He plays a cat that raises a ruckus at that time of night when you rather it wouldn’t. It’s over in 30 seconds. Hit it and quit.
Or “Recording a Spotify Ad,” at 2.9 million views. Using a bullhorn, clanging pan and a noisy blender, he mimics the irritating ads they use on Spotify to push their premium package. Twenty seconds start to finish.
Gus, 22, is from Grantsburg, a village of 1,300 people in northwest Wisconsin. But a lot of his mini-moviemaking the past four years was in Menomonie, where he just graduated from UWStout in digital cinema production.
If you think posting silly videos online is a time-killing hobby, consider that Gus paid his way through college doing this, and he earns a pretty decent living from the money he makes from his cut of advertising, sponsorship, merchandise sales, licensing fees for
use of his work on TV shows like “Tosh.0” and other ways people have figured out to monetize this passion.
It’s been his full-time job the past two and a half years, and this summer he’s moving to Los Angeles to pursue filmmaking and acting as a career. He and another video producer he met, Eddy Burback, will get a place together near Beverly Hills and collaborate on projects.
This all started when Gus was in middle school. He and his buddy, Joe, would shoot action movie parodies and other little sketches and toss them up online where just about nobody watched them.
Gus kept it up during high school but didn’t break through with a video until he was a freshman at Stout and discovered Reddit as a source of viewers.
You’ve heard the quote about nobody ever going broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The first buzz-worthy video Gus made was 10 seconds of him banging on drums to the “Indiana Jones” theme while wearing his mom’s floppy gardening hat. It got 150,000 views in a month and showed Gus what was possible.
“I try to incorporate an element of relatability into everything I do. A lot of my videos and jokes are derived from things that frustrate me. I like to think that if they frustrate me, they frustrate other people,” he told me.
Among his spoofs are being single on Valentine’s Day, fake news, middle-aged cellphone users and the irritating habits of college professors.
He has posted more than 400 videos to his YouTube channel, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Most range from 30 seconds or less up to a few minutes. Including the videos that are stolen by people and reposted, he makes the claim that his work has been viewed a billion times, mostly by males age 24-35.
Competition is relentless. I’ve seen various numbers, but it looks like 100 or more hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Gus has 410,000 followers on the site.
“People’s attention spans have gotten so short these days. If you make yourself a source of short jokes, people will stick around and be like, ‘I could toss this guy 30 seconds of my time every few days.’ I like getting in and getting out and being really efficient with my comedy,” he said.
He recruits fellow theater students from Stout and other friends and siblings to act in his videos. He appears in nearly all of them, often handing the camera or smartphone to someone else to operate. His parents, who work as high school coaches, have been supportive, though they let him know they don’t like the nasty language used in some videos.
Gus sometimes suffers for his art. He got cut up pretty good in a “Jackass”-like video about ramming your bike into a chainlink fence. And he was burned in one about cooking picnic food using fireworks and gasoline.
A 30-second video might take all day to make. Gus stays away from politics and Trump as topics. And he avoids reading the thousands of comments left by viewers to avoid becoming dispirited by the relatively few who say he’s not funny.
“I have more ideas than I have time to make them,” he said. “The biggest challenge is making sure that people don’t get tired of what I’m doing or who I am as a person. Internet patrons can change fanship really quickly.”
Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist.Jim.Stingl