Cool Zone Media. Hello everybody, Two quick plugs here at the top. First, it is the last call for listeners to get tickets to the Bechdel cast post Oscars live celebration at Dynasty Typewriter this Sunday, March second, in LA. There's going to be live and streaming tickets available right after the Oscars viewing party at Dynasty. If you want to come early and watch the ceremony with us, you're welcome to. Tickets are in the description, and it's going
to be super fun. Secondly, this Thursday, February twenty seventh, the subject of today's episode of sixteenth Minute, Liam Kyle Sullivan aka Kelly, is workshopping his latest show, a Liam Kyle Sullivan Show at the Lyric Hyperion in LA. Tickets also in the description. I cannot wait to see it. Enjoy the episode. Drag in comedy has a long history. I can never have children.
We can adopt some. But you don't understand.
I'm good.
I'm a man.
Well, nobody's perfect, not indigent.
Hello, I'm a church lady and this is church chat. Well, it's so great to be back.
I've been gone for a while doing missionary work on ABC.
And drag and comedy have been connected since the moment both existed. Obviously, there's a million ways that people have interpreted this from case to case over the years. There's the point of view that many of these actors are sist straight men playing against type for laughs, some would say, at the expense of making women look silly. An example that comes to mind is Will Ferrell as Janet Reno. Hi, I'm Janna Reno.
Welcome to Janna Reno's dance party. Coming to you alive from my basement.
See I really like dance.
Do that soon.
There's the historical truth that comedy has generally been overwhelmed by this men, making drag performance necessary. If theem characters were to appear on screen at all again going to SNL in the long stretches of time in which they never cast a black woman, actors like Tracy Morgan and Keenan Thompson would be in drag anytime a black woman appeared on the show as a character at all. Here now, the preview of her work is Maya.
Angelou Sina.
As always you ever vest the sweet aroma of women in full bloom like that?
That's good?
Right?
Oh yes, But drag on mainstream TV isn't really drag culture in order to define that, and I'm not the person to define what drag culture is. It encapsulates a far wider community, spanning class, race, gender, sexuality, location, history in general. So for a working definition, I'm gonna kick it to Kareem Kupchandani, author of Decolonized Drag, whose drag name, by the way is Lahore Vajistan. Incredible, he says, here's
my take. Drag is a genre of performance practiced in entertainment, nightlife, and festival contexts by and for gender and sexual dissidents, primarily the people who fall under the umbrella categories of queer and transgender, but also many others at the margin of normative gender and sexual configurations. But when it comes to mainstream culture drag, before drag race, there was a genre of drag that was basically, wait, this famous cis man shouldn't be in a dress. See Jack and Jill
or The Nutty Professor. But in other famous pieces of mainstream media drag, characters are real characters, and drag is used as a storytelling tool about gender and sometimes race, culture or sexuality. I think to see missus Doubtfire, White Chicks, Hairspray, Juana Man, She's the Man, Tu Wong Fu, The Birdcage, Some like It Hot. The list goes on, and there are plenty of criticisms of all of those movies to
be had. However, no matter how many politicians try to suppress and weaponize drag performance as dangerous, that is so clearly horseshit. Drag has been around for as long as we have, although the way it's been presented in mainstream culture tends to be fairly prescriptive. You probably know that drag culture has gone very mainstream in the last fifteen years, in large part thanks to the ever expanding, occasionally fracking RuPaul's Drag Race Empire.
Room.
While drag race queens are selling out gigantic theaters and becoming mainstream celebrities in ways that would once have been unheard of. But drag race has its complications.
Too.
Many performers would agree that drag is inherently political, a case that is carefully made by Kupchandani in Decolonized Drag, and he does not spare drag race in this assessment.
He carefully outlines the ways in which drag race has been historically reluctant to change, especially not including trans competitors on the show for years, as well as racial tokenization and often enforcing this colonial lens of beauty onto the queen's whether that means criticizing body hair, fatness, imperfect tucking,
and just a general reluctance toward complete genderfuckery. Drag Race has an emphasis on slogans and marketing based on individualism, something that many collective drag communities resist while continuing to like any reasonable person would, continuing to watch and enjoy Drag Race anyways, because it's drag race. I cannot recommend
decolonized drag enough. It not only reframed the political nature of drag for me and introduced me to a bunch of incredible acts I wasn't familiar with, but it also includes I think my favorite line in a book ever, there is a hunger for critiques of colonialism at the club. Wouldn't know, don't go to the club. But let's get back to comedy. Drag in comedy is a very complicated topic, the kind of comedy topic that will shock you and
how unfunny it can become. And obviously, my interpretation of any of This is certainly not the final word, but for the purposes of this episode, let's use the general comedy rules of who's the target? Are we punching up? Are we punching down? Because there are some drag characters in comedy where the target of the joke appears to be women or femmes, either a specific person or a broader caricature by a sismile performer who did not perform
in drag. Outside of this, Monte p Ithon does this a lot.
An ugly kind of violence is rife stalking the town. Yes, gangs of old ladies attacking fit, defenseless young men.
On the other side, there are famous comedy drag characters that are equally hyper feminine but are actually characters. It's pretty commonly agreed on that the kids in the hall were a sketch group that did drag a lot more thoughtfully without ever sacrificing the funny. Here's Jocelyn, what would.
You say if aliens came down and tried to pick us up?
Would they pay us in our own money?
No?
In alien money? No, I'm not fear without the game.
No.
Dave Foley, Oh my god, what a hotty And it will come as no surprise that the kids in the hall were a big influence on our subject this week. The first drag character to make it big on YouTube, and I'm happy to say, in my opinion, built his character out with the big personalities associated with drag without any contempt for his character or just women and fems in general, that a lot of earlier Python style efforts were more mean spirited and self conscious about.
So.
Drag had been a fixture in culture for centuries, with a long and complicated history, but it hadn't yet cracked the mainstream Internet by the mid two thousands. But a full three years before Drag Race would debut, a character would break through on what would be the biggest Internet platform in the world. One day. In early two thousand and six, YouTube was just starting to find its footing, not as a dating site as it was originally intended,
but as a video uploading platform. It had its first major viral hit in December two thousand and five, shortly after its.
Launch, Placy Sunday check o through the late afternoon capell just to see how it's doing.
Hollo, what a pause?
Sand Park, what's blacked in?
Did you want to say.
This?
Is almost a twenty year old sketch. You guys sorry about that. This was a Lonely Island digital short starring Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell that originally aired on SNL, and, like a fair amount of early YouTube, the platform then relied on broadcast institutions to prop up their site, where users did not yet have the tools or the incentive
to upload content of their own. And just months after Lazy Sunday, a character named Kelly came along an independently produced sketch by Liam Kyle Sullivan.
Shut Up, duk skig, I'm gonna botslap yes, shat back.
Maybe you remember this video And if you're thinking no, this other video I remember must have gone viral first. Probably not. The only real contender and it would be a hard tie is a video uploaded by comedian Jackson Lapley called Evolution of Dance, a video so that Lapley himself uploaded to the site in April two thousand and six. And we'll leave it at that because I hope to make an episode with him in the future. But that's about it. Most of the early YouTube hits like.
Candy Candy, Mountain Chardy, Charlie, We're going to Candy.
Mountain, Josh m.
Some stay Dry and feel the paint. Wow, Chocolate Rain two weeks in a row. Pretty amazing. All of these clips came out at least a year after Shoes, and the only reason that I can't tell you the exact moment Shoes first became a hit on YouTube is because
its first upload no longer exists. The video first appeared on the writer, director, and star's website early in the year, after what he describes as months producing the video with friends on the weekend and featuring a character that he honed on comedy stages in Los Angeles between acting gigs. That character was Kelly profoundly mid two thousands in her aesthetic, wearing a blonde wig with bangs, fingerless gloves, nick black rimmed glasses, a mini skirt, and a pleathor vest over
a pink T shirt that says super femme. This would later be replaced with an iconic black T shirt that simply says betch. The character is played by Liam, but Liam is not a known entity at this time, so to most fans of this video, it's not Liam, it's Kelly. The most popular upload of Shoes now includes an opening
sketch that establishes a wider world of characters. Two conservative New England parents with teenage twins, a boy they're obsessed with, and Kelly, their daughter, who they demean at every opportunity. But in the original video it cuts right to the chase. A droning club beat kicks in after Kelly storms out of the house.
Kelly, what are you gonna do with your life? I'm going to get what I want?
And what does Kelly want?
Cheers? Cheers, cheers, Oh my god.
Cheers Liam Kyle Sullivan a k A. Kelly. Your sixteenth Minute starts now.
Joy, stay get the Claim.
Sixty six.
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we take a look back at the internet's most famous characters of the day and figure out how their moment changed their lives and what it says about us and the Internet. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus, and I consider taking Taco Bell up on their seven hundred dollars Vegas Dinner, marriage and Elvis impersonator deal for two whole minutes this week, before realizing my mom would literally break me in half
if I did that. And this week we're returning to the mid two thousands to catch up with an Internet celebrity, All Heimer, Liam Kyle Sullivan and Kelly. And while the Internet had been around for some time, by the time we met the gorgeous Frankenstein who is Kelly, the concept of celebrity that began online was still very new, making our girl nothing short of a pioneer. So come with me if you dare to. Early two thousand and six,
the Pittsburgh Steelers win the Super Bowl. Go Yinsers. It's the year that Junior Highs would be shaken to its core by poor Borat Impressions and Liam Kyle Sullivan's character Kelly became a star on YouTube, although Liam himself was basically the last person to know because, as I said, he didn't upload the Kelly video himself. So where did this mysterious uploader? Rip Shoes and Liam's other massive viral had from this year, muffins from Well, they downloaded it
from his website PSA to my listeners. Under twenty five, there used to be this thing called websites. Children would have to learn how to make them on a different website called neopets dot com. Some of us still have. I have an updated mine in two years, and that was only because my diabolical ex agents wanted me to take their names off of the site. At the time
Kelly went viral. Liam was kind of a technophobe. He was born in nineteen seventy three and, like many Gen xers with him, was punk rock skeptical of the Internet for some time before it involuntarily changed his life. And to be clear, so let me be clear, whoever uploaded shoes to YouTube wasn't doing it in order to make a quick buck before the creator could realize that he could make that same quick buck himself. Liam actually really encouraged people to download Shoes, Muffins and other videos.
Come to Pleasant Valley Road in Santa Rosa. Well, you can have a warm picnic under the sun. It's always a beautiful day here at Pleasant Valley Road in Santa Rosa.
Which I can tell you for sure because when I visited his site on the way back Machine, clicking on the Muffins sketch automatically downloaded it to my computer. He'd first shown this sketch during his live shows because he literally did not know that YouTube existed yet. And what's more, there was no quick buck to be had on YouTube in two thousand and six. Like so many moments in this story, you'll find that it is very arguable that Liam Kyle Sullivan went viral just a little suits because
this was not YouTube as we know it now. This was over a year and a half before YouTube accounts could monetize goddamn anything. It's months shy of Google's one point sixty five billion acquisition of the platform in late two thousand and six. There wasn't really a path for virality yet at this time, because the site didn't financially incentivize successful users to stay, and mainstream entertainment still viewed web sensations as kind of entertainment second class citizens, although
it never stopped them from trying to do something. Here's Kimmel in two thousand and seven.
We are back.
Patherine Bell is here with us. This song has been covered by the likes of John may or Trey Coole, has gotten more than four million views on YouTube blown, and it easily gets my vote for Song in the Summer from Minneapolis. Please welcome Tayzon Day with the song Chocolate Rains and Tonight's Internet Talent Showcase.
But before we can get to what Liam did with this unprecedented, nearly uncharted kind of success. Let's get to know him a little better like all of our greatest artists, and I'll say it people. Liam Kyle Sullivan grew up
in Massachusetts and went to a weird congregational church. By all accounts, his childhood was really nice, although elements would end up inspiring Kelly's family In his future work in Shoes, Liam plays Kelly's father, Kelly's twin brother, and Kelly and told me that he developed the exaggerated sibling dynamic based on how his older sister was treated in comparison to
him when they were growing up. While they were similarly good kids, didn't drink, didn't do anything, Liam remembers that his sister had imposed rules and curfews that he never did, an exaggerated fate that he would later assign to Kelly in the sketches extended intro.
Happy Birthday Twins A computer and a car. Thanks Mom and Dad.
Kelly, go ahead and open your present.
How the how would you expect? Condamns It's a gigantic toy dinosaur And before the needle drops for the beginning of the song, Kelly's parents both call her fat and Sluttie or Liam was a theater kid and went to Emerson College in Boston, wisely dropping out after a year like I should have, and that's because he was already
accomplishing what he was going to school to study. He quickly started getting parts and became a fixture of the Boston theater scene at the time, focusing on straight ahead theater. I'm talking The Grapes of Wrath, A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Threepenny Opera, all pretty heavy stuff. And after a few years of that he did what all perfect people do. He moved from Boston to Los Angeles, and by the late nineteen nineties, Liam is a working actor trying to
build out a career for himself. He appears uncredited in a nineteen ninety nine episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, also in Drag. He is in a Dick Wolf show called Players question Mark. He's in a sun Dance indie, and he's in a bunch of commercials for Guinness, e Trade, Dell, and PlayStation. A very solid resume, but not exactly creatively fulfilling in the way that playing al Jode in Boston was so. Liam did what most actors who don't get
into recreational sports or Cooke do. He started taking comedy classes. When I learned this, I realized that there were a few things that I had made false assumptions about with Liam before I met him for the first time. After watching the Kelly sketch for years, I felt sure that he had been doing comedy for years and years when this sketch came out, And I also felt sure that he'd done a lot of drag work. But neither of
these things were really true. The Kelly costume isn't winning any drag race challenges anytime soon, but Liam embodies this character fully to the point where he says he was almost never recognized by his voice or appearance in public. And as for comedy, that was something he began doing around two thousand at the recommendation of a friend to branch out a little bit, and he ended up falling in love with sketch at the now shattered Acme Comedy
Theater in North Hollywood. So Kelly actually comes from his serious training as an actor and his personal life experience, and it's at Acme Comedy Theater that characters like Kelly begin to take shape. By the early to mid two thousands, he was performing and taking classes there regularly, leaving dramatic stage work mostly behind, while taking on guest roles in film and TV where they came what's your favorite early
Liam Kyle Sullivan role, Jamie Well, thanks for asking. That would have to be the photographer in season five, episodes thirteen and fourteen of Gilmour Girls, Wonderful.
There we are, Okay, everyone in just a little closer. That's perfect.
Hold that good job, Liam. But if you asked Liam, he was probably most excited about his first meaningful recurring guest star role on TV, on ABC's hit comedy eight Simple Rules. He made these appearances in two, two thousand and four, and two thousand and five while he worked on developing a solo sketch show simply titled a Liam Show.
On the side. The role on eight Simple Rules was a big break after years of hustling, but he managed to balance it with a Liam Show as he continued to build out new characters, many of which would appear later on his YouTube channel in some form. Obviously, one of these characters was miss Kelly. So this all starts as a stage show, the kind of sketch show that involves a humid black box theater and running backstage to
change wigs while top forty music plays between characters. It's a humble beginning many such cases, but what made the difference was Liam's decision to start adding interstitial videos into the show to help them flow a little better. And Kelly was a popular enough character with his audience, and he enjoyed playing the character enough so he decided to
make a video with her. We talk about it in our interview in more detail, but here's how Liam described the production of Shoes on his website in February two thousand and six.
Then I had some ideas for funny short films. I thought if I could borrow equipment and shoot them with my friends, I could put them together and put up a show and have a whole lot of fun doing it. I called my friend Eduardosis Naros, and we made a whole bunch and then I put them together, and here I've got a show and a website. I write, produce, and direct everything, but Eduardosis Naros and Rich Briglia have helped a lot with cinematography and co directing. I also
edit everything myself. A bit of a control freak, yes, but in my experience, collaboration with friends always makes a better product, so I listened to my friend's ideas.
This text appears alongside a picture of a young Liam reaching toward the camera with the caption area actor gropes for career. Other stuff on this site includes the sale of a comedy DVD question Mark he really was not an Internet guy anyways. This dvd sold for ten dollars and featured a collection of video sketches that he'd worked on with friends over the past few years. Most of
these would eventually end up on YouTube as well. Titles include Doctor Oulay, Sex Therapist, Fever, Bitch, Muffins, and wait, hold on, Let's circle back to Muffins muffinss Okay, this episode is mainly focused on Kelly and the phenomenon that was the Shoes video, but we should take a quick side quest to talk about Muffins because it was wildly successful as well, and was also originally re uploaded to a primitive YouTube by someone who had originally downloaded it
from Liam's website. The joke of Muffins is a little more straightforward than Kelly Lore, but it does feature another Liam drag character, one he says was loosely based on his mom. Missus Cunningham is an eager, older homemaker in a short gray wig, a pink mumu, and an apron forcing a series of bespoke muffin experiments on her unwilling test subject, her son Johnny.
What would you like for breakfast, Johnny? Muffins? That's right, at Cunningham muffins.
We know that muffins make.
The best breakfast, so why not try all of exciting new flavors.
A bunch of you were like, oh my god, I remember that, Yes you do. So the meat of the sketch is, and how weird and eventually sinister the muffin flavors get For every fan of this sketch, everyone has their favorite muffins. Here are mine, paper clip, nosepaper fire. And at the end, you'll eat a muffin.
You'll eat it and like it.
God, describing the jokes and a sketch is so miserable. Just go watch it. It's still up. It's good. The premise is very simple, it's well written, William's performance is great, and it's clearly independent. Filmed on a random day in
someone's crummy kitchen. Within a year or two of Muffins release, there would be early YouTubers who would create similar, generally less good comedy for YouTube and other platforms, but seeing an independent sketch like Muffins or Shoes breakthrough at the time, made by someone no one had heard of before, was a pretty new concept. Keep in mind, the only other sketch to have been super successful on YouTube at this
time had literally been on SNL. But in these sketches, which are still Liam's most successful, a few consistent things stand out. They're independently produced, they're dark but can be enjoyed by anybody, they feature drag characters, and they were not written and made with YouTube in mind. So let's go back to Shoes and enjoy the glory of the video itself. So we know the general setup, with Kelly as this neglected, rebellious daughter and a middle class neighborhood
whose shoe shopping to stick it to her parents. But the majority of the song is Kelly's shoe shopping with her friends in multiple locations across LA, appraising.
Shoes like this bes rule facious sock, beacious rural facious sock.
The aesthetic here could not be more mid two thousands. There's all of these, like quick zooms on Kelly's face. The shots are very high exposure, high contrast of her Doc Martin slamming the pavement of Melrose Avenue, and the camera will often cut to her friends in similar hot topic waste chain, low rise khaki pants. Those were so uncomfortable. It's this hyper feminine shopping montage. But the best part is that it has no patience for men whatsoever.
I think you're shoes.
Shut up.
I think you have too many shoes. Shut up. I think you have too many shoes.
Shut up.
I think you have too many shoes. Shut up. Stupid boy, stupid boy. Let's get some shiites. Let's party.
During this sequence, Kelly is literally stepping on men. She steps on the camera at one point as a male shoe salesman cowers in fear. And then we cut to this huge pool party full of scene kids, and then back to Kelly to put her parents into debt once and for all.
These shoes are three hundred fucking dollars.
Let's get them, and as many remember. Kelly ends the video by mouthing off to a snobby sales rep in the most iconic way possible.
This style runs small I don't think you're gonna fat I mean your fader kind of bag.
Oh oh.
Oh, by the way, fuck you fuckwuck.
This whole sequence is intercut with random high exposure shots of hot girls and leather bikinis with flaming fula hoops. It's a whole vibe. And sure, is this a very two thousands Sex and the City parody way of describing feminine liberation through shopping. Well, yeah, but that's the point. Kelly is a drag character that's commentary on oppression experienced in white teens. Suburbia might not be the most radical thing in the world, but it was really different for
this time during the Bush administration. It would be pretty unlikely to see a character like Kelly become this prominent by being supported by traditional media engines. And what's more, you can't help but root for Kelly. Her parents treat her like shit, and so she puts them into credit
card debt. It's a recession era of fantasy. In decolonized drag, Koreem Kupchandani draws attention to a far more diverse group of drag performers doing their equivalent of this, building out the world of their drag characters by pulling from their personal life, as Liam did from his New England childhood with Kelly. And when Kelly and Shoes hits YouTube, it
goes nuts. But Liam doesn't realize this right away. He's staying on his normal actor grind, He's getting a bit part on Alias, He's continuing to perform on stage at ACME. The Internet is a part of his plan to grow his career, but it's not the plan. And unlike today, where the viral life of a video can rise and fall in the space of a couple hours, it took Shoes months to catch on when the pace of the
Internet was much slower. In Liam's recollection, it was weeks before he heard his videos had been both uploaded and extremely successful on YouTube. And it only even heard of the platform because someone he did comedy with had told him about it, and once he found out, he had to figure out what to do about it. I have tried so hard to figure this out, but it is unclear exactly when the first upload of Shoes disappeared or
how many views it had when it did. But the primary upload of the video is now on Liam Kyle Sullivan's channel, uploaded in April two thousand and six. His upload of the shorter Shoes music video is made in early May, and according to a Vice ten year retrospective of the video from twenty sixteen, Liam wasn't convinced it was big, big until that September, when the video was featured on a Los Angeles early morning show called Good Day LA shows.
Oh I got this is shoes.
This is my new favorite song.
Oh this shooz.
Cheoz Hello Kelly, why God cheers?
Oh my god, Kelly's drag quay.
Let's get some shit and she lives here. Some shit. Let's get this shit pool, Let's get this shit shutally what?
And Liam was so excited about this that he actually uploaded this clip himself, which was quickly followed by shout outs on TRL and more and more press in the mainstream, not just to say have you seen this video Shoes, but just as much to say, have you heard of this new thing called YouTube? And boy would we? Liam seems to understand in the moment that in the short term, his newly minded YouTube channel is where people are going to go to see his work, and so he starts
planning to release new videos featuring Kelly. Was this always the master plan. Turns out not really, he told Wece in twenty sixteen.
I had written a bunch of songs and actually had to be persuaded by my friend to shoot a video for Shoes. But I had no idea I'd be doing so many different things with her At some point, I was just throwing everything out there, like what else can I do with Kelly?
Turns out a lot, but again keep in mind that the trickle of viral content at this time worked much much slower. Liam filled the space it took to produce new Kelly videos by uploading his back catalog of sketches, including a re upload of Muffins and other videos that it appeared on his DVD. In June two thousand and six, Liam released an entire album of music from Kelly, including a lot of hits that would later translate to future music videos, like such as.
You Couldn't Do Him.
Persons Playing Up.
This one features major Kelly fan Margaret Show as I Think a dominatrix. Liam would actually go on to tour with her. As an opener shortly after the Shoes video first blew up. Then there's no booty.
Calls about what he's saying. You want to get together. I want you to comb overall dressed up and leather.
They used to do back in out too, Give me.
Nice dreams, make me want to stream.
That's not happening again. That was back then, and now I'm interested in bigger and batter men. Nobody coll Zach, Nobody call Dach. That's not happening.
And I think most successfully, let me borrow that top.
Let me borrow that toss. Let me borrow that toss. Let me borrow that toss. I want to borrow that top.
And while these hits didn't hit the heights that Shoes had, they were all successful to the tune of millions of us. And they also expand upon Kelly Lore. We meet more members of her family, cleverly integrated by Liam from other characters that he did in his one man show, plus a cool, hot vampire best friend named Heather, and for my money, in these future videos, Liam Hammer's down repeatedly
on the empowerment of Kelly's character. Even as the people around Kelly continuously fail her, whether it's her strict parents, asshole boyfriends, or girls who think they're better than her, Kelly and her friends always have endless confidence in her. It's never Oh my god, I'm so insecure. I'm a loser. It's You've wronged me. I know it, and now I'm gonna eat you for fucking dinner.
My acdient face powered and he plays with his RL.
I'm put in a game, and if I confused you, I'm gonna have to lose.
You. Go back to first grade and get yourself a blues clue. I don't even know what ever made me chanse yet, but I could do better.
What are you saving it for? You're not even worrying it.
You're not gonna wear it.
Let me borrow it.
And while this round of viral Kelly videos released between two thousand and six and two thousand and eight appealed to really anyone who was remotely logged in at the time, it seemed to appeal to kids quite a bit, I think because Kelly was really funny, but she was also really cool. You were never ever laughing at her the way that you see punching down drag comedy that we
talked about earlier in this episode. She was awesome. YouTube monetization would come around via their Infamous Partners program in late two thousand and seven, but In the meantime, Liam grew the character and made ends meet in other ways. One was touring his act through the country with Margaret cho and Solo, appearing as himself and doing stand up
about being Kelly. Most of the clips from this tour were uploaded by fans who attended back in two thousand and seven and feature Liam talking about how becoming Kelly made him a better man.
And so I was like, how do I do that?
And so it was it was a little struggle, But the biggest struggle was finding women's clothes in the stores because I had no fucking idea. One size in this brand is a totally different size than this other brand.
What the fuck is up with that?
Somebody needs to like organize that shit. And then like everything, guys, you know why women ask does this make me look fat? It's because everything you wear as a woman makes you feel fat. It's like nothing comes in your size. Like I go in and I was like, you know, I'm a guy, but I'm not like huge or anything. And I go when I say, oh, this is a nice little top here, do you have this in a large?
And the girls like now, it's like fuck you, okay, And so there's that, and then there's makeup, Like I found out how fucking hard it is to do your face in the mirror, and you know, guys, when you're like, come on, honey, hurry up, it's time to go. What the fuck's taking so long in the bathrooms because there's a lot of fucking worm to do in that.
And while they're on the lower side of views. Liam also made sketches with Kelly between music video releases that, in retrospect are sort of reflecting on the experiences that Liam was going through in real life while trying to translate Kelly's online fame to a more traditional acting career. In August two thousand and seven, he released Kelly's Hollywood Meeting, where a series of identical looking white guy agents desperately try to sign Kelly while having basically no idea what she does.
You too, if everyone's too When you touch it.
Sinner, Jit said too. I went to Harvard. I have you record deal crazy?
One billion Chinese?
What's that means?
Two billion shoes?
Right, Kelly?
I saw one set of footprints.
Yeah, we're carrying him.
In the other hand, Christ was off making a campfire or.
Some gay Was that a young Chris Hardwick. No need to look him up if you haven't heard of him. He was canceled and acquired by Hurst Meeting. Yeah, no comments. This sketch continues.
Kelly the Shoes video, the Shoes album. I mean it's a no brainer. We've got to sign you. We need you, we love you, we need you to be part of us. We want to make money off of well, we want to make money for you.
Let's get some uh huh so yeah. Liam seems to be poking at the fact that people were eager to profit off of Kelly but didn't really know what to do with her. In the sketch, the agents are trying to get her to sell cereal called honey nuts chet bags, and because Kelly takes shit from no one, she lets these guys have it.
Why Ah.
The video ends with a woman flipping off the camera and a teaser for Kelly's new music video, let Me Borrow That Top. The message is clear, Kelly isn't going to sell out. Kelly is punk rock. Liam admitted in an interview with People that came out this past week that he doesn't really feel comfortable expressing anger, but Kelly does, and that's empowering for him.
I get really uncomfortable with anger. It's hard for me to express it because I just kind of get scary. But when Kelly does it, there's something about it that connects, because there's a lot of injustice in the world and we've got to address it.
Around this time, he also stars in a short lived VH one sitcom in two thousand and seven called I Hate My Thirties, while continuing to upload to YouTube as Kelly and himself with his other characters. The in between videos are simpler by necessity, mostly tour promotion or fan
appreciation montages. The last major Kelly music video was released in two thousand and eight called where do you think You're Going In That, where Kelly's mother calls out her perfect hot topic outfit and incorrectly translated Chinese character tattoo, Excuse.
Me, where do you think you're going in that? You're gonna march right upstairs. That's what you're gonna do, march it.
Kelly doesn't even speak in this one. It's just an increasingly demented club beat of her mother's criticisms of her outfit, while Kelly becomes increasingly glamorous and adored. It's what the kids are now calling Recession Core, released during the two thousand and eight recession. I'm not sure what's happening now. I think it is not sure what to do during
the rise of fascism Core. Liam also wins a People's Choice Award at this time for Shoes, over two years after it came out in the category Best User Generated Video. Should have e got it. But even if you're a big fan of Kelly, which I consider myself to be, Shoes, Text, Mess, Breakup and can I borrow that top are as big as it got outside of the longtime fans. Make no mistake,
Kelly's legacy was absolutely cemented in YouTube Loor. Liam says that he's been reached out to incessantly to recognize the twenty year anniversary of YouTube recently, and that plenty of people say watching his work is the first time they
remember watching YouTube at all. But because of how little the media landscape understood the Internet at this time, Liam never saw the profit that a creator would today with an equal number of eyes and an equal number of eyes, we're talking hundreds of millions of views is basically unheard of today. It's no exaggeration to say that Liam at his peak was commanding Walter Cronkite numbers, but at the time those eyes were not perceived as having value. It's
fucked right. In retrospect, it makes me genuinely irritated how it's YouTube that benefits from Liam's creativity while the system that legitimized YouTube as a starmaker never nurtured his career in the way he deserved. And this is a straight white guy. Think of all of the people more marginalized
than Liam that never stood a chance at this. But Kelly continued, as did Liam, posting primarily and most successfully as his star character as well as his coterie of other characters for the next five years or so, while continuing to maintain his mainstream acting career. The most famous non Kelly character he did was Aunt, Susan, Kelly's gay aunt, who he released a second album as in two thousand and nine titled Susan Walker's Greatest Tits.
My Name is Susan Walker, Go Raiders.
I Don't Know. Into the twenty tens, the Kelly character rolls with the times during a YouTube culture that was becoming increasingly popular, algorithmically driven and relying more on search engine optimstation then the weird ingenuity that introduced us to her in the first place. During this era, we get Kelly vlogs with the character taking questions to camera directly, Kelly, what do you.
Think about Kim Kardashian while she's a hot batch? Kelly, please talk about Cony Okay? I saw Cony twenty twelve, and then I saw all the controversy and backlash against this director who made it, and I was all, this guy's just trying to help people in Africa.
What did you do today?
Bats lay off?
But by the time the last of these videos were released in twenty twelve, YouTube had changed a lot. This was a year where pewdie Pie and Jenna Marbles were the most successful users on the platform, where being a YouTuber was now considered a job, and where users now needed to branch out to multiple different platforms in order to fully thrive. And by this time, Liam was happily married in a story that I'm going to let him
tell you because it is so great. He was starting a family and behind the scenes was struggling with keeping the character up during a version of YouTube that he was somewhat less than enthusiastic about and so, while Liam continued to post videos as other characters for a while.
After this, Kelly all but disappeared for a period of years, and Liam pivoted to a series of full time jobs with a skill that he wouldn't have had without Kelly, video editing for the Internet, specifically working for the Fine Brothers, Nickelodeon, and DeFi Media meaning honest trailers, smash, et cetera. Over the next several years and things as Kelly are quiet
for a bit. YouTube, of course, grows into a behemoth over the twenty tens, and by the tenth anniversary of Shoes in twenty sixteen, the platform's modus operandi has shifted to click baby headlines, vaguely radicalizing content, BuzzFeed video, and, to Liam's benefit, content that got people nostalgic for the
early Internet. This is the year that Liam appeared on the then Fine Brothers channel in a video called YouTubers React to Shoes viral video classic, in which either now canceled or niche YouTubers of your most notably Shane Dawson, watched and reflected on the influenced Shoes had had on the platform. In Liam's standalone videos, we get a clearer idea of who he is ten years later, and really
who he's always been. A very thoughtful, sweet person who is surprised that his creation has had such an impact on people.
When I was looking at all the stuff that YouTube provides, like you can look at who's watching and when they stop watching, and with that in my head, I became like an executive, thinking business rather than creative. I could never really get back to that kind of like, all right, guys, we're gonna make a video and it's cool.
It was all.
It became much more of a business.
So the YouTubers of this episode talked about this video as being one of the most important in YouTube history, and some specifically even mentioned how you inspired.
Them to do what they do on YouTube.
I mean, that's incredible. Ah wow, that's amazing.
It's so lovely seeing how Liam takes this in. But he had his own relationship with the Kelly character, as well as the stress and burnout that can come with internet churn and the pressure of trying to make something happen. While he and Kelly had a solid legacy, it had never quite turned into the multi million dollar career that we see today with YouTubers who are working with far less cultural cloud and it was up to him to process that. So for the moment, the character stayed inactive.
Kelly didn't return to YouTube until all the way in twenty twenty, when she came back for a Lockdown theme mask endorsement.
Let's wear a mask. Let's wear a mask. Yeah, Let's wear a mask. Let's swear a Mask.
But aside from his few other Lockdown era live streams, Kelly didn't really come back in earnest Liam and his wife Elana had a second kid and continued on their respective career paths. Liam went on to work for BuzzFeed Video and is currently an editor for The Try Guys fun Fact, but things changed last summer and Liam couldn't stay away from Kelly any longer. Last year, Liam was contacted by a Pride event in LA asking him to
perform as Kelly. He hadn't performed as her on stage, or really much on stage at all for nearly a decade at that point, but the event pushed because they explained Kelly was a queer icon. After the better part of two decades creating, accidentally becoming famous from and not quite making a career of Kelly. Because of timing, Liam suddenly saw his creation in a new way, not as a vehicle, but as someone who really meant something to people,
including him. My conversation with Liam Kyle Sullivan. When we come back, welcome back to sixteenth minute. I'll be at the Liam show this Thursday in Los Angeles, will you? Two weekends ago, Liam generously agreed to meet up with me at the Lyric Hyperion Theater in LA The place where he's currently building out his solo show about his history with Kelly Featuring Kelly, is also where I've built out most of my own shows over the years, and
somewhere I think a lot of really special stuff happens. Anyways, this is an interview that we did in the Lyric Hyperian Cafe. Though it does sound like that, but honestly, I kind of like it. We're in a place where both comfortable in we're drinking coffee, we're shooting the shit, and we're being from New England. So this was a pretty lengthy conversation. So I'll share the first part here and we're going to air the rest in a second
part this Thursday. So consider this your invitation to an informal sixteenth minute hang with Liam and Jamie Go Bruins.
My name is Liam Kyle Sullivan, and I'm known for the Shoes and Muffins videos on YouTube that I made almost twenty years ago.
That's that feels crazy for me. I can't imagine how.
Sometimes it's like it was yesterday and other times like yeah, that feels about right.
Twenty years at the Lyric, which is where you're workshopping your show, is this the first time you're talking extensively about your life and like about Liam on stage and like your connection to Kelly.
Yeah?
Well yeah, I think it was because last year you got an invite to perform Kelly at a club downtown. It was a show called What's My Age Again? Oh okay, it's a nostalgia show. Nice at precinct.
I talk about it in the show.
I at first, I said, in my head, I said no because I kind of, you know, closed that chapter at least in my mind. I'd made one video during the pandemic about masks, but I hadn't performed live as Kelly in easily ten years.
I think was there like a specific decision made to be like I'm done or it just sort of happened.
No, it just sort of happened.
Yeah.
I was hot for I don't know two three years, and then by year five, I was like, oh, really cooled off. And I wasn't able to parlay it Hi Jake I into more, you know, traditional television or film success, and I just couldn't keep up with how the landscape had changed. She had to post so much, and I was still kind of operating on the release of a music video every six months or something like that. Right, I was still in that mind frame, so I just
kind of stopped. And then when I got that email, I was like, Wow, this is something I never thought I would do again.
I ended up doing it.
How did it feel?
It felt amazing? It felt really good good.
There were so many people who I met who were just really happy to meet me. And I was under the impression that, you know, I was kind of like old news, but people told me, no, I saw you when I was like thirteen. It just inspired me, you know, I thought maybe I could be a YouTuber or I can do drag.
Even somebody told me it helped them to like out.
That's amazing, it's amazing, right, And I just felt so good.
About that, and I realized that I hadn't really engaged with that audience because I was thirty two when I made the video. Talking to kids online seemed inappropriate at the time.
A lot of YouTubers don't seem to realize, well, yeah, but.
I think maybe times have changed a little.
I don't know, but at the time, it was new, and so it just it seemed like, no, I'm not going to engage with a thirteen year old online or I didn't know how old people were.
Sometimes I'm so glad you had that experience at presume, because it does feel like with the Internet, there like there is like a different kind of attachment. It feels weirdly closer. And I don't know why that is, but I think, especially in the early days of.
YouTube, I think also there was no algorithm controlling what you saw, right, so it felt more like I found this. It was more like the music business used to be, where you go and find records or find bands on your own, and they felt so personal to you.
Yeah.
I think maybe that's part of it, because it was new and corporations hadn't found it yet.
When I look back in YouTube history and it's like, oh yeah, if you were on the for you page anytime before twenty thirteen, it was because a person saw your video and was like, this is amazing, and it just feels like, you know, when a person sees your video, there is no agenda other than this video is really good.
Yeah. Yeah, it felt a little like a meritocracy.
Yeah, what happened to that?
What happened.
Anyways? Precinct? Yeah, everythinct.
So that experience was so inspiring to me.
Then I thought, why don't I do a show like go back to because I used to do live shows all the time, right, I called them a Liam's show, and I do sketches, I do short videos. That's where I first started making videos was for my live show. It wasn't for YouTube, and so because YouTube didn't exist. But I thought, oh, let me try this again. And this time instead of doing a bunch of characters and like stand up stuff, I could do like like tell my story. And it was challenging.
Because I talk about this in the show too.
When people know the Kelly character and shoes and then they meet me, they're kind of like, huh, you're not slay. You know, you're not fabulous or sassy and I'm like, no, I'm not, but it's in there. So I don't know if you ever saw a Team Wolf with Michael J. Fox where he turns into a wolf and he's an amazing basketball player, but when he's a human, you know, he's just okay. Yeah, I'm kind of in that zone now. I'm like, no, I want to play the game as a human.
As myself, and then Kelly's your enterteen Wolf.
Kelly's my enterteen Wolf.
Yeah.
Now is it like about that period of your life? Is it about your whole life?
I mean there's whole life stuff sprinkled in.
Like I talk about my mother and my father, my sister, my friends, people who inspired me, some celebrities that I met, the experience in the industry, and how unique it was at that particular time. I talk a lot about that and where I'm at now and how that experience last year at Precinct was kind of a springboard for other gigs,
Like I'm glad that I can still do it. I remember being scared to get on stage again with a microphone, and you know, the music and the crowd is all like pomped up, and I got there and I forgot how to work a microphone, Like there was a little on button and I completely forgot to turn it on and I just started.
Talking that long.
Yeah yeah.
So then I was like, oh yeah, oh yeah, turn it on. And people thought it was a bit like that I was being funny, so I played it off that way. The crowd was so warm.
They just bullied me, you know, they kept me up and loving and like I could have fallen on my face and they would have been.
Like, great, okay, it good to see you man.
You know.
Hearing people's stories was just like, oh my god, I got to keep doing this, you know. And so I went up to San Francisco. I booked a gig at San Francisco Pride, which was amazing. People would tell me, I hope you're getting your.
Flowers, you know, yeah, and it felt so good. I was like, wow, okay, yeah, I'll take some flowers, thank you.
Yeah, you've earned them, and like finding them sort of this new joy in it. That's amazing.
It's a total new joy.
Yeah, because for a while I felt really trapped by it because when you're famous for something. Was it Taylor Swift who said you'd kind of get frozen in that time, like I couldn't seem to break out of it, right I had, I had to keep doing it, and I think it kind of made me feel like a robot, like do the song and then go home, or do you know, do something, Kelly, that's it.
And so I felt I'm not growing at all. I feel a little like a little hackish, you know.
More with Liam Kyle Sullivan when we're back, Welcome back to sixteenth minute. Here's more of my interview with Liam Kyle Sullivan. I want to go back a little bit to that first moment, so Kelly came out of your live shows or.
Yeah, I was doing sketch comedy in the late nineties early two thousands here in La I was with a sketch group called Another Showcase Showdown with the Acne Comedy Theater. I think sketch really helped me as a performer, because before that I was doing like straight theater like I would do in Boston.
Nicey, oh, I've got questions about Yeah, I've got questions about mass jests. I've noticed her.
Hat oh yeah yeah, Fenway.
Yeah.
I would do plays and I did you know Shakespeare and Bricked and Noel Coward and because that's what theaters were doing, and so that's where I auditioned, and luckily I got cast. But when I moved out here, I was like, okay, let me keep doing theater and that's what I knew, and I did some plays, but you know, I was like, well, I have to get into TV. I didn't move out here to just do theater.
You know.
I was doing showcases and stuff like that, and I was doing a play. I was doing The Missing.
By Moliere and a friend of mine said, you know, you should look into sketch comedy because you're you're kind of out there like your characters.
When you do something, you go balls to the wall.
And I was like, yeah, that's how you're supposed to do it, right, And she's like, but I think I think sketch would really suit you.
Yeah, it's like okay.
So that's when I found sketch and I was like, oh, improv sketch, you know, stand up. All that came later and I was like, oh, okay, this is really fun. I can write my own stuff. I didn't know I could do that.
Well, it's like and you had the hardest part out of the way, where you already knew how to perform.
And later when I found sketch, I branch out into playing women because I have, you know, kind of an effeminate I'm an effeminate heterosexual. I'll just say it, And so I leaned into that and I've I've found much more power in that and artistic freedom than trying to butcher up and parts that I would never get cast at.
You know, I'm not going to play at Jock.
Were you a comedy fan as a kid? Did you have like favorites as a kid.
Yeah, I loved comedy. My sister and I used to wake up early to watch The Three Stooges because they came on at like six in the morning on Saturday mornings, I guess later SNL. We were one of the first families that I knew to get a VCR. My father was a he worked at Channel five WCVB.
Oh.
Yeah, he did editing and stuff, and he knew all that technology really well. He had to convince me to buy a computer really yeah.
Wow.
Back when I was like, you know, late twenties or whatever, Like, I didn't have email for a long time. Kids in the hall too, when I was a teenager. I loved kids in the hall.
A very drag heavy sketch group, I mean a lot of yeah.
Yeah, and they did it like it was not like they were playing a woman, yes, doing a glamorous thing. And that's how that informed me too. I got to meet Bruce McCullough, amazing, I'm going viral, and it was so cool to sit down with him and have a conversation like we were peers, Like he treated me like a peer, he called me brother. It was so great and nothing came of it, but there's just that one meeting was so you know how they say never meet your heroes, not always.
He was wonderful, you.
Know, Montifaison. It's like they do a lot of drag, but they're sort of making fun of women in the way that they do drag. Yeah, but the kids in the hall never were, and Kelly never.
Was, Like it was just like this is just this is the character, and yeah, this is a real person.
Yeah.
I wanted so badly to make her look and act like a real person. I mean she's a little exaggerated, but just the look especially, and I remember getting comments.
Like are you a boy or a girl? And I was like, yeah, yes, yeah.
Because I wanted people to kind of not see it as like, oh, here's some guy thinking he's making fun of women or something like that.
That's not what I wanted and I never felt that way.
Did you originally make these videos to be posted? Did you make them to be shown live?
Like?
How did that?
Like?
What made you decide to add in video elements?
Well, I had been making short videos for my live show.
So I would do like a character on stage with a monologue or a song, and then I'd show a video and go backstage and change as a new character and come back out.
I had about an hour.
Another aspect was, well, what about a film festival like slam Dance and so shoes did not get accepted.
But wow, egg on their fucking face, right, No, no.
And then I had a website.
And I'd seen what Lonely Island had done, right, and I was like, oh, okay, so you make a website and you put videos up and then you invite industry to that somehow like was it was not a fully formed plan at all, right, but.
Just kind of like an online portfolio kind of thing.
Yeah, But it was also like, I want to create my own work, because that is a satisfying can be really fun. See it gets you working, even though you're not getting paid, you're working. So when you're working, you have a vibe right when you walk into someplace like an audition, that says, hey, I've got shit going on.
Yeah, like this isn't my whole day.
The video is taken from your website and uploaded to YouTube, not by you originally.
Originally yeah wow. So how long did it.
Take you to find out it was a there and be very popular?
It took a month or so.
Because now things go viral and they're kind of over like it takes maybe a day or a week or you know, very short time.
But back then it was still.
So new, like viral video didn't exist really, so it took people time to find things. You know. I think you had to like send a link via email. I heard about it word of mouth, wild Yeah, someone just told me in person, said do you know about this YouTube?
You're on there?
And so I made a channel I put my video up. So there were so many iterations, so the word of it out there. And Muffins too, I remember very specifically the one there was an upload of muffins that had thirty million views, and it was some other person who did it?
Crazy?
Isn't that crazy?
What was your relationship with the internet?
Like before all of this, I had no relationship whatsoever.
So this like forces you to change that, right, Like oh yeah, I had to adapt myself. Yeah, even email you didn't want to days to get to back justice people. They'd be like, I just emailed just I'm like, I don't come on guys, because when you know, things started heating up for me. I kind of had to in those meetings that I got, kind of explain a little bit, like how I got to where I was, how I made it to this meeting.
You've got eyes on you, but they're not on your account, Like what? Yeah? What was what did you first do?
I mean my first reaction was excitement, Yeah, because I felt like this was a great thing.
This was a showcase for me. People were seeing me.
I was getting attention and maybe they would find their way back to my site and know who I was or I I loved it. I loved seeing that people liked my work. The fact that it was other people uploading it didn't even read as like oh hey wait.
Right, because I wouldn't have been weird done Really, it wasn't it?
Was the Revshare.
It was like this underground thing, yeah, that the grown ups didn't know about yet, and it was really fun and cool.
That's awesome. Yeah, I loved it. And only later when revshare became a thing did I realize what I'd missed out, Like if I'd.
Waited a year or two, It's like, how could you have known?
But how could I? Yeah, no one could predict the future, and I've stopped beating myself up about that. I talk about that in the show too, how I needed therapy.
Thank you so much again to Liam. And if you're listening to this and are in the LA area the week this episode comes out, I will see you at the show on February twenty seventh. I am so excited. And Part two of this interview will be released on February twenty seventh, this Thursday, and you're gonna want to tune back in to hear how Liam and his wife
Alana met. It's truly amazing. There's so much more I could say about Liam's work, about its effect on YouTube, about its effect on drag, about its very personal legacy for a lot of kids who are now adults, and remember Kelly as this cool punk rock, Fuck you Mom channel of early Internet anger. But honestly, I'm just so personally very inspired by Liam, not just by his creativity, but by his willingness to connect with his creation's legacy. And there's a lot more to come. See you Thursday.
Sixteenth Minute is a production of fool Zone Media and iHeart Rodops. It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Rostis. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is from Grant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my cat's fleeing Casper, and my pet rock Bird who will outlive us all. Bye h