Brian Jordan Alvarez’s ode to sitting makes him the most recent comic to wring ineffable pleasure out of a really viral, very foolish music.
We’ve simply lived by what Vulture has labeled “Foolish Music Summer time,” throughout which onomatopoeias (Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam”), farcical movie ballads (Barbie’s “I’m Simply Ken,” The Tremendous Mario Bros. Film’s “Peaches”), and a Eurodance satire (Kyle Gordon a.okay.a. D.J. Loopy Occasions’s “Planet of the Bass”) went viral. Novelty songs—fluky, hummable jokes—are nothing new, however TikTok has accelerated their manufacturing, and broadly, the cultural temper is trending towards cheesiness and wit.
The newest and biggest instance is “Sitting,” by TJ Mack, an alter ego of the comic Brian Jordan Alvarez. Be warned that you just may not like or perceive what this video is, however you gained’t be capable of get its melody out of your head or neglect the pure regulation it reveals: “Sitting is the other of standing / Sitting is the other of operating round.”
The phrases are sung in a pseudo–Robert Goulet bellow by some unusual man whose face is usually mouth and eyes. He elongates sitting right into a rumble of pleasure; he provides an m sound to the tip of standing; he rolls the r’s of operating round. Over the course of the music, the cogency of the lyrics diminishes—sitting is “kinda like a nap / It’s kinda like one thing else”—however Mack’s enthusiasm, and the proximity of the digital camera to his big enamel, doesn’t. We’ve all improvised this type of nonsense to our pets, besides now we, the viewers, are the pets.
After Alvarez posted “Sitting” to his social-media accounts earlier this month, the web stood in ovation. Remixers gave the music dance-pop and orchestral remedies. Cowl artists rendered it as lovely people and cringey musical theater. Even radio stations have given “Sitting” a spin. “Inform me this isn’t that catchiest music you’ve got ever heard,” one DJ mentioned in her introduction.
The phenomenon could seem to be a random burble of the web’s id, however Alvarez has been making equally entrancing—if principally nonmusical—work for the previous few years. He’s an actor beforehand identified for his function on the Will and Grace reboot and for his 2016 net sequence, The Homosexual and Wondrous Lifetime of Caleb Gallo. (He was additionally on this 12 months’s campy smash M3gan.) Pandemic isolation pushed him to attempt one thing new: taking selfie movies, and making use of filters to his look and voice in an effort to invent a brand new forged of influencers.
The primary such character, born within the early days of social distancing, was a meditation knowledgeable preaching about the “pure supply power” that may be tapped into by signing up for her class. Her identify was Marnie T, and her chuckles and pauses and references to unique travels approximated the precise tics of people that suppose they know the secrets and techniques of the universe. This was each humorous and legitimately hypnotizing: Marnie locked her extraterrestrial gaze onto the digital camera with an depth that every one however forbade the viewer to scroll away.
Different surreal but oddly recognizable characters entered the combo. They included a southern aunt who’s blasé about her fabulous wealth, a naive homosexual man swept right into a legal conspiracy in the future at brunch, an alien from a capitalist planet whose speeches mix Black Mirror and Workplace House. Then there was TJ Mack, a happy-go-lucky TJ Maxx shopper who sings songs about no matter’s on his thoughts—laser tag, splashing, water, and now sitting. His spouse, a girl of Grinch-y glamour, made her personal movies, gloating in regards to the excessive life afforded her by her husband’s music profession.
Alvarez’s cinematic universe captures one thing fashionable: the weirdness of monologuing to an imagined on-line viewers. Nevertheless it’s additionally basic character work, half invention and half imitation. “I really like folks,” he instructed Vulture. “And I’m observant. I believe … I form of take in somebody’s power, and I course of it, even when it’s 20 years later.” Talking with Them, Alvarez mentioned he’d initially hoped to make use of his expertise on Saturday Evening Reside or conventional sitcoms, however the web confirmed him that he may do it on his personal. “Think about having a expertise that you just really feel like no one cares about,” he mentioned, “after which all of a sudden you understand, ‘Oh my God, folks do care about this. I used to be proper. This can be a cool factor to do.’”
Platforms corresponding to TikTok and Instagram are, certainly, consuming conventional comedy’s lunch recently on the subject of humorous characters. SNL and different late-night retailers have fitfully tried to evolve by hiring social-media-trained abilities and focusing on some sketches towards the terminally on-line crowd. However the most effective format with which to satirize our digitally mediated actuality isn’t going to contain a number of cameras or a soundstage. It additionally isn’t going to be broadcast on TV networks that yearn to re-create the earlier century’s monoculture. Our consideration spans and tastes hold fracturing, and the rankings for late-night comedy hold declining.
In the meantime, Alvarez’s characters are a part of a rising pantheon of weirdos who dwell in our telephones. Mass-niche audiences additionally tune in to Psyiconic’s Terri Joe, a demure Christian lady who savagely insults random folks on livestreams, and Conner O’Malley, a machismo-poisoned prankster who as soon as smoked 500 cigarettes for 5G. These comics riff on the absurd issues the web has accomplished to our brains and {our relationships} with strangers. However in addition they rejoice timeless human tendencies, corresponding to sitting.
