Recombinant Comedy, Transmedial Mobility, and Viral Video

When Time named “You” the magazine’s 2006 person of the year—and included a functional mirror on the issue’s cover—it marked a watershed in the popularization of user-generated content (Grossman). Admittedly, there is some irony in pointing to such an old media stalwart as the bellwether of a cultural shift largely associated with new media, but it speaks to the inherent messiness of contemporary popular culture as it courses almost indiscriminately through the mediascape. More elaborate discussions of Web 2.0, convergence, and the rise of online participatory culture through Internet streaming video have been helpful in accounting for the mixed and transmedial nature of the swell in user-generated activities facilitated by networked digital media.¹ Consequently, the term “viral” seems entirely appropriate as the popular description of how online videos travel from user to user and medium to medium. But is there anything that marks the user-generated texts that enjoy the highest degree of virality? By most measures, the most widely seen user-generated clip online as of late 2010 is the humble “Charlie Bit My Finger . . . Again!” (“100 Million Club”). With over a quarter billion views for the original YouTube upload alone, it ranked third on YouTube’s chart of all-time most-watched clips, falling just under music videos featuring Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga (“YouTube Charts”)—and all this attention has been directed toward a rather simple home video that captures, in just under one minute, a baby brother biting his older sibling’s finger in an unexpectedly forceful way.

How might we begin to understand the popularity of such user-generated content within emerging online video culture? While one might point to the popularity of other baby videos or more generally “cute” videos, what links “Charlie” most directly with other user-generated viral videos is the shared element of comedy. The video might just as easily have found a mass audience through an airing on America’s Funniest Home Videos (or, more likely, the UK’s You’ve Been Framed, as the Davies-Carr family is English), but the affordances of networked digital media have allowed this humorous clip to spread much more widely than the audience for such programs would have allowed. The importance of this notion of “spreadable” content has prompted Henry Jenkins and other media researchers to endorse this designation as a more useful descriptor than “virality” (Jenkins et al., “If It Doesn’t Spread [Part One]”). Granted, the more outwardly positive connotations of spreadability give more hope to those seeking to master the unsettled waters of streaming content, but virality itself has taken a more positive gloss in recent years while still retaining a sense of unpredictability and even anarchy. Furthermore, there’s something about online comedy clips that is unmistakably “viral” in nature—specifically, the pervasive phenomenon of recombination. Just as the successful propagation of many biological viruses is a result of the ability of multiple viruses to “recombine” their genetic codes through intracellular replication, the successful propagation of many viral clips is a result of the ability for multiple cultural codes to be recombined with them and through them once they find an audience online.

While many viewers likely encountered “Charlie” in the form of its initial upload, a significant aspect of its online popularity (and that of most other viral clips) is the ability of users to employ the video as raw material for their own versions, remixes, or mashups. With titles ranging from “Charlie Bit Me—Remix” to “Batman Bit My Finger (Charlie Bit My Finger Spoof),” there are over 150 official video responses posted to the clip’s YouTube page (“Charlie Bit My Finger—Again! Video Responses”). Jean Burgess has highlighted the integral nature of such responses in her move to assert “the central role of cultural participation in the creation of cultural, social and economic value in participatory culture” (102). I would like to build from this necessary perspectival shift and augment it with a consideration of the primacy of humor in the participatory culture of viral video. I will briefly trace what has long made...