Obviously Read online

  Feeling like the day is over

  The increased prospect of nuclear war

  All the books I haven’t read

  Monthly subscriptions to anything

  How slow my computer is

  3-D printers making guns

  Life

  How to Make a YouTube Video

  Since begging to be considered a YouTuber and living long enough to see that become a controversial title, I have learned exactly what it takes for anyone, and I mean anyone, to make a YouTube video. I’m not saying this will help you go viral, and what does that even mean anymore? There are too many TV shows and movies and podcasts now to have a real cultural moment (unless you’re Stranger Things or Insecure . . . are you Stranger Things or Insecure???), but that should be a motivating factor. What used to feel like a guaranteed hit can be completely overlooked thanks to the aLgOrItHm, so you just have to make what will make you feel happy and astonished that you finished a thing. Here are the steps to making a YouTube video:

  1. Come up with a video idea. Usually this will happen over dinner or after watching a movie or TV show or listening to an album in its entirety or on repeat. The idea is the most important thing. YouTube videos are like jokes: if the premise isn’t there, no one is going to get what you’re doing.

  2. Overthink how to shoot it. Your brain thinks you’re Spielberg, but in reality even if you’re paying people to help you, there’s a high probability that because it’s a thing for the internet, they will find it acceptable to drop out, causing you to go from “We’re shooting this on $100,000 cameras with extras and stunt doubles” to “How can I Nutty Professor* this and shoot it on my iPhone before my battery dies?”

  3. Write a script or at least have bullet points of what is supposed to happen or be said. You can go ahead and not do this if it’s a vlog, but you’ll probably end up with a boring-ass vlog wherein you narrate more than you let the audience experience.

  4. Take a nap. Ambition is your Waterloo. And while you would like to just hop to it, chances are the overwhelming pressure you have subconsciously put on yourself will cause you to lie supine on your sofa, staring into the middle distance until you pass out.

  5. Make something and never be sure if it’s good. Ever.

  6. Agonize over the thumbnail image. Do you look pretty, or cool, or smart, or is this just a waste of time because the aLgOrItHm decides your fate and if you peek behind the curtain it is truly just an old guy pulling levers pretending to be the Wizard of Oz???

  7. Post the video. Overanalyze why people are or aren’t sharing your life’s work. Are you destined to van Gogh the whole thing and only be celebrated after death?

  8. Don’t read the comments. Unless you love being unhappy, in which case, go wild.

  9. Regardless of how “well” the video performs online, be prepared to be immediately asked to make something else good. It’s not like movies or albums where you can put out one every two years and be considered a genius. Oh no, people haven’t figured out that the internet can be hard work and will thus only give your success a shelf life of a week or less (thanks, Vine!). Get used to never sleeping AND never being considered truly valuable in our capitalist society. You chose this!

  Good luck!

  BB and Jennifer

  Childhood friendships are so natural. Someone decides to play with you on the playground and then you just go from there. In the case of Tiffany and Stacy, life revealed whether they’d be around for the next act in my life. Adult friendships are so much harder and require so much more effort.

  There comes a time—usually around 11:31 p.m.—in every woman’s life when she will (out of habit) pick up her cell phone, complete the five to eight motions required to unlock her screen, and tap to open the Instagram app, where she will lazily scroll until she’s received an email, a text, or maybe a tweet to distract her. She’s stayed in for the evening because she’s sick or she’s tired and has things to do tomorrow and needs to waste just a few more minutes of time before retiring to bed. Habit.

  And at this time (now 11:32 p.m.), she will scan and “like” but rarely comment on the photos of loose friends, enviable bloggers, and randos she’s not even sure how she began following in the first place. It isn’t much, but it shows that she supports whatever these people have decided was worthy of cropping and captioning.

  But somewhere within all this scrolling she will be alerted to a pattern. Jolted out of her dazed and passive focus. Perhaps it only takes two photos, but no more than four, before she realizes that jarring, painful, gut-blowing truth:

  All of her friends are hanging out without her.

  They are smiling in slightly differently filtered and posed shots with more and more people she knows (not as well as this betrayer knows them), and she understands that somewhere along the way, she’s made a very powerful frenemy who has made an apparently successful attempt to oust her from the group.

  This is the story of BB and Jennifer.

  Jennifer is my age. We met online before I moved to the city and while she was still very new to the entertainment industry. After some mutual following and fave-ing, I got to visit New York City for exactly eleven hours. Within that whirlwind day I got lunch with Jennifer at a small French bakery near her show’s studio.

  Unlike most first encounters of the internet kind, we fell into the rhythm of talking like old friends. Banter about croissants turned to lively discussion about false eyelashes, the confusing streets (how can two numbered streets intersect?!), and all the boys we never wanted to see again. The subtext of our lunch was assessing if I’d make a suitable roommate, but after moments we realized that living together wouldn’t only make sense, it would also be fun. Jennifer had moved to New York very suddenly for a major job opportunity and had landed with a Craigslist roommate who was neither friendly nor stable, and I was planning to move in just a few months.

  Well, like most things in my early twenties, our living situation wouldn’t work out. I didn’t live in New York yet, and I didn’t have anyone who could guarantee the apartment. After a few challenging phone calls and many emails filled with expensive apartments I couldn’t afford with no job yet secured, we both agreed that she should move on without me. She assured me we’d continue our friendship upon my arrival—that it would be petty to let something like this stand in the way of what was a blossoming friendship.

  I moved to New York City in May 2012. Within a few weeks, Jennifer and I had brunch in a part of Brooklyn I hadn’t yet explored. Greenpoint, which is accessible via my very own G train, was a total mystery. Google Maps is an app that is useful once mastered, but users should know that the first month of usage will lead to them walking miles in the wrong direction and standing on the wrong side of the street wishing they were dead. That day, Google Maps made sure that I was late. This was our first attempt to hop back into friendship since our roommate dreams got dashed, and a stupid phone app was trying to ruin this for me.

  Now might be a good time to mention that Jennifer and I are in similar lines of work. She found herself very famous very quickly, and it was important to me for her to know that I respected her as a person, liked her as a person, and wasn’t going to be the kind of person who would use her to get ahead. I am nothing if not maternal, and what I understood from PBS documentaries about old Hollywood screen stars was that it was the loneliness, not the fame, that drove so many of them mad. I am a good friend, and I needed her to know that.

  Back to that day: I showed up about an hour late, sweaty with explosive acne showing through my nicest foundation and an uncool outfit. Jennifer was riding a major wave of press and publicity and was somehow even cooler than the first time I got to meet her. She is both impressive and relatable, intimidating and entrancing. I had met a lot of famous people in bizarre ways up to this point in my life, but I had never been close enough to order from t
he same waitress at the same table.

  We ate a boozy brunch that went by quickly, but she extended an invitation to a cookout later that evening. We hugged. I made my way home; Google Maps made it easier for me this time.

  Resisting my catlike tendencies to eat and then lie down for fourteen hours afterward, I gave Google Maps another chance and rode the G train to Williamsburg to meet up again. That summer was a particularly humid one, and I showed up frizzy and unglamorous to the third-floor walk-up apartment. The sun had set, and the cookout was hot dog remnants and an NBA game on TV. Jenn introduced me to her group of friends.

  “This is Akilah. She does comedy, too!” she said nonchalantly. I was so used to adding a caveat about how I just moved to the city so I wasn’t really writing or performing anywhere yet. An insecure tic meant to self-deprecate before those questions arose. But Jennifer didn’t treat me like an outsider with a regular desk job. She treated me like I belonged in the glamorous world of one-bedroom apartment owners with Emmy Awards casually displayed on the mantelpiece.

  Her friends were all writers and actors who welcomed me enough for me to let loose and really be myself. After just a few minutes we were all making jokes about the game, the commercials, basically anything we could think of.

  That’s what I like to remember about Jennifer. She surrounded herself with good people who just wanted everyone to feel included. People like that are always getting invites to this and that, but you never get nervous about showing up or not being cute or interesting enough. Being there with them means that you’re safe. There’s no one to impress, because you’re with the person everyone else wants to impress.

  New York is a hard city. Everyone is busy, and it’s not an excuse so much as an ailment you learn to live with like UTIs or sparse eyebrows. You do what you can to manage the situation so that it doesn’t bother anyone else too much. As such, friends can maintain a level of closeness without actually seeing each other for a long time. Months would fly by between our brunches, day-drinking dates, and sleepovers—but it never felt like our friendship suffered because of it. Both of our careers were blossoming. Both of our love lives were blossoming. And we were up-to-date on all of it.

  * * *

  * * *

  One night a couple years later, I performed a ten-minute stand-up set at a small-ish comedy show at UCB East. Ruby Karp, a high-school freshman who had decided sometime around birth to do comedy, hosted the monthly show. Her mother is a feminist powerhouse who created one of America’s largest feminist magazines. Between the two of them, they had a huge network of talented, cool people to perform stand-up and read their stories for an hour once a month.

  I was new to stand-up and had done a few open mics up to that point, but was still very nervous to be alone onstage. Google Maps had started to like me more, so I arrived early and downed my free beverage in the green room while I considered faking sick and fleeing. I wasn’t familiar with the other comics on the lineup, but hearing the show’s host practice her bits and intros from the green room, I knew I should stay for everyone’s set. That’s when I met BB.

  My set came and went, and soon enough BB took the stage. The truth is, I really liked BB’s presence onstage. While there were some very rehearsed bits to her ten-minute set, she was wonderful at crowd work—which is the improv of stand-up. She could point to someone in the audience and ask them about their day, and then make a quick joke about it that kept everyone engaged and seemed to take the edge off remembering all of the words and pauses she had planned. I wanted to be just like that.

  After we took a group photo, I told BB that she was wonderful and we went our separate ways. We had a few friends in common, and when it became apparent that we’d probably work together one day, we did all the social media adding that one can do. At some point, I got her phone number and asked her for stand-up advice. She told me about a class at the premier comedy club in the middle of Manhattan she had taken, and I immediately paid the steep five-hundred-dollar rate and awaited the first course.

  This, I learned, was my first mistake.

  After signing up for the class online and paying the full amount, I didn’t hear anything. There was no confirmation email. There was no good way to find a contact during normal hours because that’s simply not how comedy clubs work. Panicking, thinking I had been scammed, I went to the club to get the weekly schedule for class. Tuesdays, seven p.m. Only have to take one train from work to get there.

  The first class was not at the actual comedy club but in a rented room in a dingy building on the Upper West Side. This is not uncommon. Most of the training the people who make TV and movies have takes place in dark and dusty rooms with more character than charm.

  The room was filled with mismatched folding chairs and about fifteen people of different ages and backgrounds. A seventeen-year-old wearing a suit sat next to a seventy-seven-year-old woman with a fanny pack. After a few brief introductions, it was clear that no one else in that class had ever done comedy, or had even thought about it very deeply.

  “What’s a pun?” a heavyset middle-aged black man wearing glasses from 1998 asked at full volume, interrupting the teacher in the middle of her opening spiel.

  The class then devolved into chaos. An alcoholic lawyer from Jersey yelled an incorrect answer over a mousey girl who tried to get cell service in the dungeon to find an answer. This class was for beginners. Like, real beginners. There were a couple of dads in the class who were taking it again with the same teacher, because “it’s always good to get a refresher.”

  After hearing their sets, it was clear that they were taking the class again because they had been doing the same jokes onstage since the early ’90s, and there was no way in hell that they’d ever be making their writing into a career. Now, this isn’t a critique of the people who chose to take this class. Everyone has to start somewhere. I’m just saying that I’m sure if a person who gets paid to choreograph dance routines and is currently working at a dance theater signed up for a dance course recommended by a dancer they admired, they’d be disappointed to find me there, dressed like a Missy Elliott music video, asking what ballet is and doing the cabbage patch.

  The teacher immediately recognized the issue and pulled me aside at the end of the first lesson as everyone folded their chairs and made small talk out the door.

  “I offer private lessons. This is for people who’ve never really ever performed or written comedy. I’ll email you my rates,” she offered as we headed out into the breezy Manhattan night.

  I digested this information but texted BB to let her know how it went.

  The class felt a little bogus, so we are gonna do private lessons, I began.

  Right. I mean, it’s a pretty basic class. It’s just to give you a place once a week to go with your classmates. The class should be ten percent of the stand-up, and it’s up to you to do the rest on your own, she defended. And that’s true, practice makes perfect, and that’s why I wanted to take the class.

  The teacher is fine, it’s just like there’s no structure and almost everyone there is verrrrrrrrrry beginner. I pressed send.

  Yeah, but it’s a beginner stand-up class. And you’re a beginner, right? she said condescendingly. How many shows have you done?

  Maybe twenty? I texted.

  Doing twenty shows/open mics is barely a drop in the bucket. So you are a beginner. And yeah, it’s annoying that some people don’t know what a pun is, but you’re all novices, otherwise you wouldn’t be taking the class, nah mean?

  No, I didn’t “nah mean.” Because I was taking the class because she had suggested it. By no means did I think I was ready to have a stand-up special on Comedy Central or HBO or even on my own YouTube channel, but considering I had been booking shows for six months, writing comedy professionally, and racking up major views on my YouTube channel, it seemed a little reductive to assume that I needed to start with “See Spot run.”
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  I told her I’d give the class a chance—and I did. I took the class to completion and performed in the class show. It was a disaster. No one was funny, and the two-drink minimum in a dark comedy club at noon on a Sunday certainly didn’t lighten the room. Five hundred dollars later, and all I had learned was that reading a book about stand-up or attending shows was actually far more beneficial to my growth as a comedian than paying a tired woman to explain what a punch line was to bored strangers week after week.

  I continued my day job at MTV and my weekly sketch videos for my channel, and auditioned and wrote for TV and online outlets while doing stand-up around town here and there. It was something I always wanted to get back into and really focus on, but due to other comedic success it had been repeatedly pushed to the margins of my life plan. BB and I rarely crossed paths those days, but never did I imagine she held animosity toward me for not raving about the garbage class.

  In September, Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s On the Run Tour was released on HBO. That same night, Jennifer invited me to BB’s birthday dinner at the Meatball Shop. The vibe was chill and I made friends with other comedians in the city and their significant others. The conversation was light and filled with laughs. I assumed (naively) that things were fine.

  After dinner, most of the couples left. BB and her then-boyfriend asked Jennifer and me if we wanted to go get drinks at another bar and keep the night going. Life Lesson: the answer is always no. No good has ever come after “keeping the night going.” I’m sure of this.

  A few blocks over and one drink later, the four of us sat in a booth at a mostly empty Irish pub.

  “Beyoncé is just incredible. I am gonna watch the concert at least twice when I get home,” I gushed. Jennifer sang the chorus of “XO” at full volume.

  “Beyoncé isn’t smart. And Jay-Z doesn’t give back to the community,” BB countered, suddenly cold.