The Rise—and Limitations—of Front-Facing Camera Comedy

Front-Facing Twitter Videos Open Doors for Comedians, But They’re Not the Key to Success

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Comedian Meg Stalter’s Twitter video presence has become blurred with her onstage performances in the best way possible. You’ve likely seen her videos before: Stalter as an overenthusiastic girlfriend or the mean girl from church, always projecting the same harried, hyper-confident energy. In a video from this December, Stalter acts out “[t]he scene in the movie where the main girl plays the piano for the first time since her father passed,” which culminates in a bizarre song about pigeons. Now, she’s integrated the pigeon bit into her stand-up. Likewise, fellow comedian Chris Calogero has transferred some bits from Twitter videos—for him, often Italian-American stereotypes or cliche action movie characters—to his time behind the mic.

Then there are performers like Rachel Wenitsky and Simone Norman, who see their other comedic endeavors as highly separate from their fast-paced Twitter videos.

“I don’t think it’s a choice. It just sort of shook out like that,” Wenitsky replies when I ask about the distinction between her Twitter presence (often featuring surreal spins on movie archetypes) and other work, including her comedy music project Friends Who Folk with Ned Riseley. The separation is useful for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon writer, with the videos acting as a key reminder that “not everything has to be turned into, like, a screenplay or a pilot.”

“I don’t want to live my whole life online, and I think the more active you become on a social media website the more it starts to take over your life, so also just being able to step back and say, ‘This isn’t the only place I’m making art art,’ ” she says, adding with a laugh, “That’s such a funny way to describe what I do on the internet.”