Comedian Jamie Loftus's new podcast gets to know the people behind viral moments

Have you ever wondered what happens to the people behind your favourite memes or viral moments? Comedian Jamie Loftus's new podcast, Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), takes a behind-the-scenes look at the people who get big on the internet even if just for a day.

Today on Commotion, writers Niko Stratis and Clare Martin join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to chat about the podcast, and what it says about the changing nature of online behaviour.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Niko, what drew you to this show?

Niko: This aspect of the internet is still kind of unexplored. The thing I really like about Jamie is she's almost like a cultural anthropologist. When people talk about, "We don't have an Anthony Bourdain anymore," she's kind of a Bourdain for this sort of story, right? This [podcast] takes these people who existed for a moment, and then became a joke that people used for the rest of their lives, and it examines: who are they? Where are they coming from? What did they do after this happened? Giving us a complete picture of people that exist in moments that we think about forever, but we don't really think about the people behind it. I think it's a really fascinating thing to explore, because we've never done it.

Elamin: Do you want to give an example of the kinds of people who end up on Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)?

Niko: The most recent episode is [about] the 30-50 feral hogs guy [from 2019]. [Singer] Jason Isbell was tweeting about gun control after a lot of mass shooting events in the States. Someone quote-tweeted him or replied to him, I don't quite recall. They said, "What do I do about the 30 to 50 feral hogs in my yard that threaten my children on a daily basis?" Jason took this conversation and ran with it, and then other people did, because the sheer notion of 30 to 50 feral hogs threatening your children is baffling. It blew up the internet; it was all anybody was talking about for days on end. It still recurs today.

Elamin: I was there on the internet the day that Jason Isbell had this exchange with this dude. Watching it pick up steam as the representative of like, "Hey, here's an argument for less gun control," it was bewildering. But these moments are frozen in time as a metaphor for something.

Some of these moments being put under the microscope on this podcast are very recent. The Boston slide cop story [a Boston police officer tumbled down a slide in a very embarrassing way] only happened last year. Why do you think it's worth analyzing these moments right now, even though we're just a few months removed from them?

Clare: I don't know about you guys, but since 2020, time is definitely compressed. I feel like so much stuff on the internet is very flash-in-the-pan, and there's a constant churn of what's going on. And so I think if we don't take a moment to pause and reflect, and be like, "Okay, what happened in this moment? What is the larger context? And what does it say about us that we had this reaction and that people cared about this?" I think it's just really great for us to learn from these things, even if they just happened last year.

Niko: We hear a lot about influencers, but we don't really see the machine behind the main characters of the internet. I think that is important context to understand what is happening to us and around us.

Elamin: What Jamie Loftus is doing with this podcast is elevating them from meme to text elevating them from like, "Oh, that was just a silly moment that everyone remembers on the internet," to "No, this was actually a rich cultural text that tells us a lot about who we are. This is a type of mirror that we can look at." Clare, what makes this podcast more than an exercise in nostalgia?

Clare: Jamie's looking at the larger context. One episode where that happened was the Black TikTok strike of 2021. There were hundreds of dancers on the platform who boycotted because their dances were being co-opted by white influencers who were then receiving money and credit for it that these Black creators deserved. I love that Jamie brings on Meredith Broussard, who's an NYU professor, and she connects it back to early black-and-white photography, early colour photography, and how all of these technologies have a very racist background that then feeds into present day techno-chauvinism. It's educational while also tying it to stuff that we really care about.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.