Brian Jordan Alvarez’s ode to sitting makes him the most recent comic to wring ineffable pleasure out of a really viral, very foolish track.
We’ve simply lived via what Vulture has labeled “Foolish Music Summer season,” 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.ok.a. D.J. Loopy Instances’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 most recent and biggest instance is “Sitting,” by TJ Mack, an alter ego of the comic Brian Jordan Alvarez. Be warned that you simply won’t like or perceive what this video is, however you gained’t be capable to get its melody out of your head or neglect the pure legislation it reveals: “Sitting is the alternative of standing / Sitting is the alternative of working 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 top of standing; he rolls the r’s of working round. Over the course of the track, 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 digicam 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 track dance-pop and orchestral remedies. Cowl artists rendered it as stunning folks and cringey musical theater. Even radio stations have given “Sitting” a spin. “Inform me this isn’t that catchiest track you’ve got ever heard,” one DJ mentioned in her introduction.
The phenomenon could look like a random burble of the web’s id, however Alvarez has been making equally entrancing—if largely nonmusical—work for the previous few years. He’s an actor beforehand identified for his position 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 yr’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 so as to invent a brand new solid of influencers.
The primary such character, born within the early days of social distancing, was a meditation professional 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 assume they know the secrets and techniques of the universe. This was each humorous and legitimately hypnotizing: Marnie locked her extraterrestrial gaze onto the digicam with an depth that every one however forbade the viewer to scroll away.
Different surreal but oddly recognizable characters entered the combination. They included a southern aunt who’s blasé about her fabulous wealth, a naive homosexual man swept right into a legal conspiracy at some point 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 lady 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 trendy: the weirdness of monologuing to an imagined on-line viewers. Nevertheless it’s additionally basic character work, half invention and half imitation. “I like folks,” he instructed Vulture. “And I’m observant. I feel … 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 abilities on Saturday Night time Stay or conventional sitcoms, however the web confirmed him that he may do it on his personal. “Think about having a expertise that you simply really feel like no person cares about,” he mentioned, “after which instantly you notice, ‘Oh my God, folks do care about this. I used to be proper. This can be a cool factor to do.’”
Platforms akin to TikTok and Instagram are, certainly, consuming conventional comedy’s lunch these days on the subject of humorous characters. SNL and different late-night shops have fitfully tried to evolve by hiring social-media-trained skills and concentrating 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 scores for late-night comedy hold declining.
In the meantime, Alvarez’s characters are a part of a rising pantheon of weirdos who reside 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 carried out to our brains and {our relationships} with strangers. However in addition they have fun timeless human tendencies, akin to sitting.
