A still from the short video "Lazy Sunday" showing Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg.
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Not every video goes viral. The vast majority go nowhere--YouTube hosts millions of hours of drunken parties, tearful confessions, smiling babies, sleeping cats and screen grabs from World of Warcraft, all doomed to obscurity. Nike showed a firm grasp of the form with a popular clip, an ad stealthily designed to look like amateur footage, showing soccer deity Ronaldinho putting on a pair of sneakers and then, incredibly, nailing the crossbar with a soccer ball four times in a row. Some of the successes are accidental. For a while, one of the popular movies on Google Video was a 20-sec. clip of a kid falling off a jungle gym. Others are inexplicable: a 24-year-old Midwesterner known as Nornna has so far posted 755 movie clips to YouTube in which she laconically narrates the details of her daily life. The videos are almost excruciatingly prosaic, but they have a huge grass-roots following, and they have made her one of the medium's homegrown celebrities.
Other viral videos show genuine comic smarts. One night in January a couple of Emerson College students named Jonathan Ade and Patrick DiNicola had a brain wave and stayed up late re-editing footage from the Back to the Future trilogy to create Brokeback to the Future, the time-traveling love story of young Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and mad scientist Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Viral gold. "A friend of ours posted it onto YouTube," says Ade, 21. "After that point it got away from us." Brokeback to the Future has been viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube alone and inspired dozens of knockoffs (including Lazy Brokeback, in which SNL's Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell find each other to be "crazy delicious"). "Professionally I think this is going to help me out in the long run in terms of my film career," says Ade.
That's quite possible. There's a purity to viral videos that can't be replicated in other media, if you can use purity to refer to a medium that is at least 5% fart jokes. Nothing can force a clip to go viral. It requires an authentic response from a mass audience, and the mainstream is learning to respect that. Soon after their unsanctioned VW spot hit the Net, viral admen Ford and Brooks were hired for a series of spoof political spots for Britain's Channel 4, and they've gone on to work for McDonald's and the Sci Fi Channel Europe, among others. Says Brooks: "It put us on the map."
And what about David Bernal, a.k.a. David Elsewhere? He's living the viral dream. Since that night in 2001, he has danced in commercials for 7-Eleven, Heineken, Pepsi and Apple's iPod. He has shown his stuff on Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel and Steve Harvey. He did a Volkswagen ad that consists entirely of his gloriously funky reinterpretation of Gene Kelly's classic Singin' in the Rain routine. He even did a cameo in You Got Served. "The choreographer had seen [the video] and wanted me to be in the movie," Bernal says. "That's usually how it works. I don't have to audition. And even if I do, they just want to see if I can still do what I used to do."
Reported by Johnny Dwyer / New York and Laura A. Locke / San Mateo