MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Tracing the “hilarious black neighbor” meme reveals a confluence of the Internet’s best and worst traits. For the uninitiated, the meme started when an Alabama newscast interviewee yelled “Who else seen the leprechaun, say yeah!”, a clip that quickly went viral. Since then, several “neighbors” also found Internet fame, including YouTube hits like Antoine Dodson (“Hide yo’ kids”) and Sweet Brown (“Ain’t nobody got time for that”). Taken individually, each neighbor might be a particularly engaging local, but the memetic quality of these interviews reveals a pattern targeting low income people of color. Moreover, by “autotuning” these news segments, meme creators literally distort issues like rape, arson, and drug addiction. The think piece circuit has already problematized these patterns as racist and classist. In this paper, I instead explore how the “hilarious black neighbor” has come full circle, focusing on the Netflix show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Todrick Hall’s YouTube series.

Schmidt’s theme song autotunes the black neighbor who rescues its eponymous heroine from an underground cult, but the show also extends this character humanity outside of the clip and interrogates the conditions and repercussions masked by distractible viral culture. Todrick Hall integrates real-life neighbors into his YouTube series, which parodies cultural mainstays (e.g. Disney princess movies) by altering the races, genders, and sexualities of familiar characters. This strategy grants agency to neighbors, making them subjects rather than objects of laughter and providing a subversive path “in” to traditional media. I argue that both pieces demonstrate the Internet’s capacity to correct perceived marginalization by re-routing and redistributing power among producers, consumers, subjects and objects. In this way, both traditional and non-traditional media agents become forces for balance and increased parity of voice.