Youtube Nation: The "Best Week Ever" Audition Video

At least he's honest

While the past year of covering the worst crap the World Wide Web can provide has convinced me that the Internet is indeed the lancea sanctum in the Passion-battered body of our once respectable society, I can acknowledge that television is the cross. It was TV that turned whole generations into insatiable hogs of pop culture, television that pumped our heads full of catchphrases and numbingly enthusiastic sales pitches, and it was television that continues to convince the untalented masses that they can not only become celebrities, but that they deserve it. If it weren't for TV, vloggers probably wouldn't even exist.

A few years ago, executives at VH1 were in a panic because the day their broadcast programmers warned them about had finally come. They put it off and put it off until, with a blood-curdling screech, it happened: the last viable copy of the last remaining episode of Behind the Music had been rendered unplayable after being worn down by even the gentlest machines. Forced to come up with new programming and loathe to discover that the music video market had atrophied from neglect, the VH1 execs had to scramble. So, they ordered their creative teams to dig through the seemingly endless vaults of archived footage to come up with some kind of show. The result was a series of shameless nostalgia programs about the pop culture of decades past. To complete the evil concoction of creative bankruptcy, the production team for this project hired a short list of aborted celebrities to pretend to remember toys from the 80's and make fun of ridiculous music videos.

In time, the likes of I Love The 70's, 80's, 90's and If There's Still a Market For It, The 60's, devolved into formulaic compilation of more recent cultural dreck in the form of Best Week Ever. This show retained the ever-weaker cast of green screen snark-bots from the I Love series and made them even more insufferable by forcing them to talk about pop ephemera that literally happened between one and six days prior. The only entertaining part of Best Week Ever is running a small racket based on which self-hating celebrity commenter will commit suicide last.

But the would-be comics who comment on Best Week Ever at least get paid to make themselves look that stupid. What I can't fathom is why anyone would actually aspire to such a position as if it were a viable starting point for a career. Such is the case with Ray William Johnson,  a guy who has practiced everything about being a stand-up comedian except the part about being funny. He keeps a vlog that is little more than a collection of random clips followed by some variation on "isn't that stupid" or "isn't that ironically hilarious because things that were made a long time ago were not as good as things made today?" I mean, if it were 1993 and 2:00 AM, I might find RWJ amusing. But then again, I'd be nine years old and everything I'd like would be stupid anyway.