The title of this paper is borrowed from a videoblog done by Lemonette. Lemonette, in her 50s and living in Rome, Georgia, is notable as a typical YouTube vlogger who has achieved minor celebrity status (her YouTube “channel” now boasts over 7,000 subscribers), largely on the appeal of her Southern charm and authenticity. In this video, Lemonette argues that, given the truly funny things to be found in the real world, there hardly seems any reason for writers at all. She calls for a radical overhaul of the system of producing entertainment. Drawing on “the truth is funnier than fiction” logic, she calls for an entirely new profession, in place of the writer:
Later, rehashing the idea in another video, she goes a step further:
Lemonette’s arguments here are particularly compelling given the staged context in which she delivers them. With the outer conventions of a performance (drawing, specifically, more on cinematic conventions than those of the theatre), Lemonette’s videos feature title music, opening and closing credits, and even her own personal (dare we say writerly?) touches, like this joke told in the relaying of a “true life” story:
We might think, then, that online performance simply mirrors the behaviors outlined by Goffman, that perhaps Lemonette is only privileging the spontaneous aspects of her performance and ignoring the staged elements to conceal the “untrue” aspects of performance. This would be an oversimplification, though. In fact, Lemonette displays a tension between the artistically planned and the extemporaneous. This tension between self-aware performance and a gesture towards real-life authenticity is, we believe, the dominant emerging dialectical in this new mode of performance. In the following video Lemonette describes, an artist might, the capricious nature of inspiration:
Continuing the narrative of how she came up with the idea for the video we are currently watching, she takes us to the moment of artistic clarity:
Then, in a development offering exciting possibilities to artists feeling disconnected from their audiences, she invites her viewer to create meaning in her artistic creation:
Finally, as she self-referentially alludes to her own filmic tropes, she leaves the audience with the image that has inspired her video, an image that would be as enthusiastically looked on as art by Duchamp. Resisting meaning but embracing the inherent narrativity of images, Lemonette presents us with an unstaged performance through the lens of her hand-held video camera:
