FALLEN STARS ON YOUTUBE
Until a week or so ago, Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, was the most famous person you’d never heard of, a pop cultural superstar with over 50 million fans, earning millions of dollars in endorsements, but still somehow under the radar. If, that is, the radar is mainstream culture as defined by mainstream media. Not that mainstream media has been entirely oblivious. According to Forbes, Kjellberg earned $15 million in 2016. The next highest paid YouTube star made $8 million. Time magazine even named him in its list of ‘100 Most Influential People’.
But Kjellberg’s empire imploded when he posted a video of two Tamil-speaking boys holding a sign that read ‘Death to All Jews’. The
Wall Street Journal noticed, calling him antiSemitic. Sponsors dropped him, and Google, which owns YouTube, has taken him off a list of ‘preferred’ content-providers. Kjellberg has apologised but also put the blame on mainstream media for trying to “destroy” him. The two Indian boys—who call themselves
Fiverr Funny Guys—have made their own apology video, titled, almost self-parodically, ‘My Kind Apologies’. Kjellberg hired them to make the original, offensive video through Israeli-owned website Fiverr, which offers a plethora of services that can be bought at a starting price of $5. They claim not to have known what ‘Jews’ meant. They did not respond to e-mail requests for comment.
While much of the controversy has been about anti-Semitism, few have commented on the tastelessness of exploiting the boys’ services. Of course, the boys have put themselves online as willing to say or do more or less anything for $5; it is, no doubt, a reasonable source of income for them. They are also savvy enough to know there is a market in the West for ‘jungle boys’ with strong accents who play the fool. A typical video shows them waist deep in river water singing ‘Happy Birthday’ while pretending to cry. This is contemporary minstrelsy. And the boys and their customers are either too stupid or too indifferent to care.
Popular Indian YouTube channels tend to be things like T-Series, which rivals and even surpasses PewDiePie in pageview numbers.
All India Bakchod are immensely popular, though, and their American-inflected brand of ‘shock’ humour has resulted in FIRs being filed. Last month, Sumit Verma, The Crazy
Sumit, was arrested in Delhi for posting a video on YouTube of him kissing unsuspecting women in Connaught Place before fleeing. The women were apparently in on the prank. Clearly, the next battle for ‘freedom’ is over the universal right to act like a fratboy moron. And PewDiePie, leader of a movement, will have plenty of Indian soldiers on the frontlines.