"Nobody cares what we really think"

[[email protected]]

Todd Womack. Photo courtesy of Google Press Office
On May 31, the VideoPeople festival, dedicated to popular YouTube video bloggers, was held at Digital October. Google gathered the main domestic authors, and also brought some of the creators of popular foreign blogs. Among them was Todd Womack, co-author of the famous Barely Political channel.

In an interview with theRunet, Womack talked about Barely Political's most popular and memorable videos, lamented the fact that political satire has been in less and less demand lately, and recalled how Russia has influenced YouTube.

theRunet: Tell us about your most popular videos. Which ones have had the most views, and which ones have stuck in your mind the most as an author?

Todd Womack: Our most popular video isparody of Kesha's video "Tik Tok", at one point we had more views than the original video. Now there are something like 120 million, I think ( 122 million 902 thousand views at the time of publication of the interview - here and further note theRunet ). This was one of the first releases of the Key of Awesome project, now there have been about 85 releases.

This was before I joined the team. In fact, the success of that video raised enough money to hire me. Of the things I wrote, the one that got the most hits was a parody of "Gangnam Style" - we called it "Kim Jong Style". I wrote the lyrics, did the voice-over, and came up with all the visuals. And it has, I think, 44 million views now.


We did it pretty smart. We realized that Gangnam Style was something special, and we decided that we needed to come up with something really cool. I suggested, let me just twitch on camera, it will be fun. And Mark ( Douglas, one of the founders of Barely Political ) suggested playing Kim Jong-un, and somehow it all came together and worked out. I remember I spent a lot of time writing the lyrics - literally checking every syllable so that the English sounded like Korean.

So this video was very successful and I especially remember it. And it is quite harsh, namely in the sense of political satire. Since then we have made much fewer videos about politics.

Another thing that I remember - and something that I did travel agency email database myself - was a video recently called “Deck Maintenance". There was a New Zealand accent played on there, they pronounce "deck" ( a wooden veranda in front of a house ) as "dick". It's pretty stupid, but it's pure humor - two minutes, and joke after joke, one after another.

The channel is now a little over six years old, and when did you join them?

I have been working there for four years.

Do you have a schedule? Do you have to release a certain number of videos a week?

Yes. We used to make three videos a week, but at some point we realized that the quality was suffering. One episode of Key of Awesome is three videos: the parody itself, a video about how it was filmed, and a video with comments. Then we started making two a week, and then we came to our boss and said - we are tired, we are working without breaks. And since then we have been trying to make one video a week, but a very good one.