Let’s be honest: most art about being online is bad. Either the satire is lazy, or it feels like it simply regurgitates the depressing experience of scrolling endlessly, or it doesn’t feel accurate to what we actually do with our devices and what it feels like. Enter comedian Conner O’Malley.
O’Malley remains a somewhat peripheral figure within mainstream comedy — he appears in I Think You Should Leave sketches with Tim Robinson, he had bit parts in Palm Springs and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, he collaborates with fellow comedian Joe Pera, he’s married to SNL star Aidy Bryant. His real achievement, as I see it, is his consistent output of insane videos, first on Vine, on TikTok, more recently on YouTube, and his new pay-per-view website endorphinport.com.
Often, you open one of his videos and are immediately thrown in media res into a man’s ongoing and diffuse mania, full of seemingly random signifiers or references to conspiracy theories real and imagined or unhealthy fixations on certain figures. As Vice reported during the first summer of COVID in 2020, going crazy under lockdown was the perfect time to embrace O’Malley’s unhinged Vine videos. Vice’s argument was that while these short videos may have seemed more unusual pre-pandemic, under lockdown they struck instead as ahead of their time.
Watching a series of these Vines in succession is both hilarious and unsettling. O’Malley, in character as various ideas about modern masculinity embodied, screams at people on the street, almost always wealthy older men in expensive cars — “Money is a game, and you're the winner because you have the most points!” or the more frequent “HELL YEAH PIMP!” While Vice characterizes these dispatches from the mentally unwell as both “pure stupidity” and “avant-garde satire,” they clearly tap into a Trump era register of “where does comedy go from here” that you might remember from that time.
When arranged altogether, as in this YouTube compilation, you can watch as this character gets increasingly erratic and unintelligible, eventually seeming to revert to an animalistic menace, an “id demon” in Vice’s words. It’s very funny, but it’s also horrifying to see it unravel through these short spurts of deranged madness, in various urban centres, back alleys, and liminal spaces where economic and social classes mingle together but live very separate lives.
O’Malley’s more recent videos, while shared less often, are even more ambitious, and they have also engaged more with the sickness of online life. The 2021 video that launched Endorphin Port, for instance, is five minutes of discourse on the then-common topic of the metaverse.
The video was released right before Facebook changed its name to Meta, and likewise O’Malley takes on the role of someone trying to pitch (to whoever will listen) the virtual world of the metaverse as something desirable, “a new computer place that’s going to be, fucking, beautiful”: “No one will be judged if they have a pussy, tit, or ass: Everyone will design their own avatar. There will be no excuse! It is up to you to do what you want to do. A True. Fucking. Paradise. You want to be Gollum, six foot tall, jacked with a huge fucking cock and an ass like the mom from Incredibles? Go right a-fucking-head, buddy,” he screams a few metres away from construction workers jackhammering on the streets of New York. With a score by the excellent musician Mikal Cronin droning like we’re watching a horror movie, we are placed within O’Malley’s milieu and his fascination with the “dreams” of Silicon Valley in a historic age of inequality (this eventually led to his live show from this summer, “Research and Development Comedy,” which purported to showcase “newly developed comedy technologies” which use AI to cater jokes to particular audience members). Eventually, he enters a portal into this metaverse, where “water will be replaced with Sprite” and where he ends up simply watching a number of screens after driving to his virtual home in the Warthog from Halo.
That video, among his more popular ones, has around 560,000 views. His perspective remains relatively niche, even if he is many (weird) people’s favourite comedian at the moment. It appeals to the nihilistic and lonely sensibilities of the “extremely online,” lampooning the extremes of the digital economy. Mashable described his characters as “the internet incarnate. They’re outsized, puking bravado, comically misinformed and confident in that misinformation,” adding that “If O'Malley gets the internet — and I think it's proven he does — then holy hell are we in trouble.” In another video (1.8 million views — huge for him), he spoofs the early COVID conspiracy theories about 5G by smoking 500 cigarettes in support of it. Once he completes the challenge and 5G is enabled, we’re shown a rapid assortment of memes originating from “MILF Info” that Jeffrey Epstein was killed by “Burlington Coat Factory” because Epstein had planned to expose the company’s plans to “create and spread Covid-19 to sell more anti-viral coats.” Now that he knows the truth, he is targeted and blown to pieces.
O’Malley’s videos do clearly demonstrate an intimate understanding of internet aesthetics and everyday experience, going far beyond typical media narratives about falling down content rabbit holes or being radicalized by algorithms, instead merging styles and ideologies even when they contradict, or in fact especially when they contradict. It’s not as simple as, say, embodying the feed. In a recent and rare interview with Vulture, O’Malley explained his goals with EndorphinPort.com and its forays into VR and AI: “eventually, people can enter the Endorphin Port and experience what life would be like free of flesh and living fully inside of the computer.” But he also describes his relationship to the internet in more detail, like how he used to project his laptop at live shows and show audiences what tabs he had open: “Everyone thought it was a joke. But it was like, no, these are all the Wikipedia pages I have open. My one friend afterwards was like, ‘That’s maybe the most insanely personal thing I’ve seen somebody do — show that they have three different tabs open for Timothy McVeigh.’”
He goes on to describe the difference between the TikTok algorithm (“They fucking got my ass.”) and the one on YouTube Shorts: “Shorts is like going into a knockoff Spencer Gifts where they have knives and shit and posters, and they have all these $10 huge swords.” A funny observation, obviously, but he also demonstrates a keen awareness of how different platforms and algorithms operate on him, and how he’s able to extrapolate that in his work. I often see his internet-addicted conspiracist characters referred to as a way of understanding the sad men on 4chan or elsewhere lashing out in a world that they perceive to have left them behind, incel-adjacent and hate-filled angry guys with nothing to lose. This is obviously true on a surface level, and O’Malley’s videos do trade in those discourses, and one of his best, “Outlet Mall Special Ops,” goes at this type directly.
His most recent videos, though, have even more to say. Here, what we see is blearier, even more chaotic, harder to follow, and skewed beyond comprehension. Our eyeballs have a difficult time adjusting to what we’re seeing. “Rebranded Mickey Mouse,” released earlier this year, features surveillance and night-cam footage of O’Malley spending five months in the woods as, indeed, a rebranded Mickey Mouse, a demonic “hell fucker,” interspersed with animated creations, his break-in into the home of a Disney executive, fake news footage, an AI-generated G.I. Joe Biden, TikTok overlays, and much more.
His newest video, “103 fever,” might be the most interesting exploration of digital mania yet. It begins with O’Malley DMing Drake on Instagram about his 103 degree fever and asking for help, recalling his endless pleas for help from rich guys in Ferraris in his Vine days. O’Malley raps, describing a gangbang between Simpsons and Family Guy characters, and then we jump around to various scenarios: O’Malley directing traffic on the side of a highway, being interviewed by a TikToker, footage of him beating an audience member to death at a stand-up show, being worshipped by a bunch of dancing emo-goth kids on the beach, then collapsing in the middle of Times Square. Finally, Drake responds, and raps his advice: “World War 3 is about to kick off and it’s giving guys like you a fever,” the AI version of the Canadian icon sings, “to stop nuclear armageddon you must goon to pics of Lois from Family Guy’s beaver.” He tells O’Malley to start a new military branch called the Positivity Force, which is about being nice and masturbating. Then, AI versions of Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, and Justin Trudeau (“A friendly reminder that masturbation is self-care”) share their support for the Force. Of course, explaining the joke doesn’t do it justice, nor am I possibly able to capture what it’s like to watch a video like this. It manages to combine fears about AI deepfakes, World War 3, social media moral panics, and a whole lot more into a short film that communicates something otherwise ineffable about modern life: it is all of this at the same time.
Conner O’Malley may not be the patron saint of the internet, exactly, but he gets it. He’s dialled in. As he explains in the Vulture interview, it is rarely his intention to take the easy route and just denigrate the people he’s making reference to, the kind of sad guy who might see something of himself within these characters, and who might recognize the non-linear and fragmented nature of taking in information, people, visuals, images, sounds, politics, ideas, and data from algorithms, feeds, interfaces, and sources that can’t stop. “It so easily could have been like, ‘He looks horrible,’ but you’re rooting for him so hard, and there’s an in on that.” Every day online, we are bombarded by cataclysm, mundanity, and everything in between, and we try to make sense of a barrage that defies it.
Indeed, the platforms that O’Malley likes to spoof recently, namely TikTok, are invested in finding a way to turn this stream of nonsense into a form of coherence, whereby the disorientation comes to feel calming. After all, the cultural understanding of algorithms on social platforms is that whatever you’re seeing must have been chosen for you for some reason, and so everything is available to become a part of your narrative. The platform has made some inference, the system has made a decision based on what you’ve watched and liked previously, something it knows about you that you may not even know yourself. Therefore, it all must find a way to fit into your sense of self and where you fit into the world around you. O’Malley, I think, reveals that entanglement, and the hilarious danger intrinsic to how you and I live on the computer.
Ephemera
Following their new version of the greatest films of all time, Sight and Sound have shared a new list of 101 films you’ve probably never seen, let alone heard of, recommended by filmmakers and critics alike. I can vouch in particular for Me and My Gal (1932), Ehsan Khoshbakht’s pick, a wonderful pre-Code rom-com; Olivia (1951), Daniella Schier’s pick, a stunning French queer melodrama; I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993), Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ pick, a no-budget feminist screed that does in 27 minutes what Promising Young Woman couldn’t; and, of course, The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter (1984), Matthew Thrift’s pick, an all-time great Shaw Brothers kung fu film. Eager to check out the rest.
Patricia Lockwood met the Pope.
An excellent history (perhaps for fans of the Adam Curtis documentary The Century of the Self) on the monetization of attention as a legacy of a 20th century alliance between psychologists and advertisers: “What we discern in these sentences (and in the whole book of which they are a part) is the way that the rapidly institutionalizing science of human attention adroitly seconded itself to a vast and dynamic emerging commercial program: psychology, Scott promised, was the science that could assist the ad-men in the work of forcing things to our attention — because the psychologists understood the characteristics of involuntary attention in an intimate and technical way.”
Song Rec: “Prizefighter” by Youth Lagoon