There’s even a bit of Rebecca Black’s “ Friday” - the made-to-order pop song starring an awkward Orange County middle-school student that went viral in 2011 - in the way Lubalin’s stuff finds comedy where none may have been intended.
With its reliance on repurposed source material, “Internet Drama” also feels aligned with the Gregory Brothers, who broke out a decade ago on YouTube with “Auto-Tune the News,” and with Sarah Cooper’s TikTok videos in which she lip-syncs the words of Donald Trump. A huge Flight of the Conchords fan, he points to that New Zealand duo and to Andy Samberg’s Lonely Island as important predecessors in mixing comedy and music there’s also “Weird Al” Yankovic, of course, and Jack Black’s Tenacious D, all of whose jokes are made funnier by how exactingly their songs parody a given style. Lubalin’s videos sit at the intersection of two creative traditions. “There’s all these huge brands - I guess I can’t say any names - that want me to represent them,” he says. It’s wild that literally at the beginning of December I was just some guy in his apartment who makes little songs.” Now he can’t open his inbox without facing proof of his newfound influencer status. “It’s been insane and amazing,” he says of the last few weeks. For the series’ latest installment - this one based on a poll about salad dressing - Lubalin took “Internet Drama” to “The Tonight Show” for a three-way collaboration with Jimmy Fallon and actress Alison Brie. Once that spark was lit, the fire soon spread to other platforms like Twitter and Instagram, where Lubalin’s videos earned retweets and shout-outs from the likes of Patton Oswalt and Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement. (Caroline’s pal Doris? Not in the mood to hear her friend slandered.)īoth videos make brilliant use of typos in the original text Lubalin gets a weird emotional charge from vocalizing Doris’ insistence that Caroline is a “Chrietsn lady.” And his acting and camerawork, shaped by decades of reality TV’s visual hyperbole, are basically perfect - showy enough to convey the promised drama, straightforward enough to play on a small iPhone screen. Lubalin’s second video, about that broccoli casserole, expertly adapts the Weeknd’s throbbing pop-soul sound to bring to life a string of messages about whether a woman named Caroline stole a recipe from a woman named Helen and tried to pass it off as her own. “Good evening, is this available?” he moans, giving an operatic intensity to the most banal of inquiries. The music is a hauntingly gorgeous piano ballad, the singing as breathy as though he were mourning a doomed romance. In the first installment of his viral “Internet Drama” series, which he posted on TikTok in late December, Lubalin, 30, voices both sides of a contentious Facebook exchange regarding a prospective home rental.
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