From YouTube.com user: Brookers

I've been grappling with Ms. Brookers for a few days now. The girl is a freaking industry now: she has a career with NBC, she has a whole Fansite devoted to her, she has over 20,000 subscribers, and she is consistently on the top five of the "most subscribed channels(all time)" list. So, not only have the YouTube proletariat spoken, they've gotten bullhorns, started standing outside our windows at all hours of the day, and have been playing the obnoxious preprogrammed "Star-Spangled Banner" like camp councilors with too much bug juice in them.

My primary question going into her catalog of crazy was this one: what makes her so damn popular? And the answer, two days later, lots of "what smells?" faces made in confusion, and several patches of hair missing from my head is this one: I don't know.

I don't know what differentiates Brooker's videos from any other V-log on the YouTube. She seems to work from an ironic, sarcastic sort of conceit, sometimes making fun of other v-loggers. Sometimes not. Sometimes shimmying wildly to an eclectic assortment of bad music by herself. Sometimes with her younger sister. Actually, the only thing that seems to run a thread from first entry to last is her gap-toothed contortionist face and her penchant for making me feel like I'm on Acid and Crack at the same time.

Yet, somehow she owns the entire duration of each post and makes my mouse-clickin' finger go for more, like kettle corn, or Lays Chips. I am compelled by some sort of adorable, cherub-faced sorcerer that lives in a "Peeps" marshmallow-treat factory. The only reasoning I can come up with is that Brookers reminds me of an annoying and weird little sister who is kinda funny.

She'll go through several moments that feel so contrived to bother me that I want to smack her. Then she'll make a face or stumble a bit in her contrivance that makes her so immediately endearing, I can't help but chuckle a bit. She's like a really, really, really cute version of Karen Finley, although that may be giving a bit too much credit to her construction of the skits and not enough to her natural bizarreness.

I wonder if she walks down the street and gets stopped by her fans, and if so I wonder what they expect her to be like in real life. Is Brookers out of her mind? or does she put on the crazy like a mask? Is there a way to distinguish those two?

Truth is, I don't know. I don't even think she knows. Maybe if she figured it out she could be an artistic force to be reckoned with. Or maybe watching her figure it out on screen is what makes her so alluring. I don't know. All I know is that in this day and age, there is no such thing as 15 minutes of fame; those misguided voices that were once blips on the five o' clock news radar can now have their own television show, their own deal with Carson Daly, and a Wikipedia entry.

Labels: Brookers, cap'n guthrie, comedy, dance, NBC, Weird, whateva