What 4 Internet Celebrities Did After They Got Famous Pt 3

4 Tay Zonday Has Carved Out A Nice Little Niche For Himself

The Balls Cabaret is a long-running live show in Minneapolis featuring amateur comedians, singers, actors, poets, and authors. It has helped launch the careers of Maria Bamford and Nick Swardson, and it gave the world Joel Hodgson, the creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Pretty big names.

There's one more name they can add to their list of illustrious alumni: Adam Nyerere Bahner. Adam played all around Minneapolis during his college years, mostly open mics. Lamenting that keyboards were much clunkier than a guitar -- and therefore couldn't be played on street corners as easily -- he figured YouTube could be his street corner. He came up with the name "Tay Zonday" by throwing together random sounds. He stuck with it only after a Google search yielded no results.

He posted his first video, an original arrangement of Pachelbel's "Canon In D" in February 2007. He posted his first original song on April 12. Ten days later, he posted his second -- "Chocolate Rain":

And then the world lost its goddamn mind. Human beings were physically unable to prevent themselves from watching the video. In 200 years, future humans will classify it as a legitimate case of mass hysteria.

There was hardly a show Tay Zonday didn't make an appearance on. Tosh.0, Jimmy Kimmel Live! -- he performed "Chocolate Rain" on Maury, the show where dudes dance when paternity tests prove they didn't impregnate the psycho who made them take a paternity test on Maury.

He starred in a Dr Pepper commercial. In a Super Bowl commercial for Vizio TVs, Tay Zonday is the third lead behind Beyonce and Numa Numa guy.

He was interviewed by Good Morning America twice. TWICE. What do you talk to Tay Zonday about a second time?

Robin Roberts: "So, tell me: Are you still that guy who sang that song ... what was it called?"

Tay Zonday: "'Chocolate Rain.' And yes."

Robin Roberts: "Yes to what?"

Tay Zonday: "That was me. Who sang the song. 'Chocolate Rain.' You know, Chooo-coo-laaate Raaa-iii-"

Robin Roberts: "Yeah, yeah. I, uh, I get it. I remember."

Tay Zonday: "OK."

Robin Roberts:"Wow. Still you who did that ..."

Tay Zonday: "Yeah."

Robin Roberts: "Okie-dokie. Well, after the break Dr. Cornel West is in for a hair-raising makeover from resident makeoverologist Sharon Blernz. Stay tuned. Thanks, Chocolate."

Tay Zonday: "It's Tay."

Tay Zonday made it big with very little. Not even NASA could predict the trajectory of Tay Zonday's career. So, what's Chocolate been up to?

After The Fame

He sang the main theme from Skyrim:

And he does a spot-on impression of Three Dog from Fallout 3:

Tay is still singing. It's mostly covers of hit songs. But his bread and butter nowadays is Let's Play videos on Twitch. It's mostly a lot of him playing Hearthstone. It's a lot of Hearthstone. If you want to watch Tay Zonday playing Hearthstone for four and a half hours, here -- do it. I dare you.

Recently, he started venturing out beyond the Internet. He has a recurring role on Adult Swim's The Jack And Triumph Show:

Tay Zonday isn't cranking out "Chocolate Rains" every week, but he's found a groove that he's mostly sticking to, occasionally venturing out to try something new. Ten years ago he was on track to get a Ph.D. but left academia to entertain people with his unique brand of Internet silliness. Every video and every voiceover he records from his home recording studio pays his bills. That's a pretty good life.

Every year the makers of World Of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, host a convention called BlizzCon, a yearly gathering where big news is broken and merriment is had. The con regularly features a lore panel, a question-and-answer session where fans can ask the game's story writers anything they want about Warcraft's sprawling plot.

At BlizzCon 2010, a kid wearing a bright red polo stepped up to the microphone. The question he asked tore the world (of Warcraft) asunder.

For those who didn't watch the video: The kid -- in a voice that suggests he's not fucking around -- brought up a discrepancy between the game and a World Of Warcraft book titled The Shattering. The book claimed that a character named Falstad Wildhammer was on the Council Of Three Hammers, but in the game he was replaced by Kurdran Wildhamm- aaand you don't care. In short: The dude in red pointed out that Blizzard's lore keepers had made a continuity error.

The panelists thanked the kid in red for pointing that out and vowed to correct the issue. The kid in red thanked them and walked away, stone-faced, to resounding applause. A fan had stumped the writers of the most popular video game in the galaxy and just walked away like it ain't shit.

The footage made its way online, and an Internet celebrity was born.

There must be some kind of Internet celebrity gift basket that someone mails to the random person the Internet has decided to make famous on any given day. It probably includes some artisanal cheeses, maybe a free membership to a high-end spa, as well as an autotune remix of their viral video:

And some clever Photoshopped images to honor the person being ordained:

Red Shirt Guy, as the Internet collectively called the person whose real name is Ian Bates, from Parkland, Florida, had officially become Internet famous. He was mentioned on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Lopez Tonight (back when that was a thing), and even got a write-up in his local newspaper. Ian's dad is the co-host of a popular morning radio show in Miami. Every morning during that time I was able to hear Ian's dad exude fatherly pride as his son became something of a celebrity in the community that mattered so much to him. It was heartwarming.

Here's the best part: Shortly after his first question in 2010, Blizzard honored Ian by making him a non-playable character in the game:

That's Wildhammer Fact Checker, aka Red Shirt Guy, aka Ian Bates. So don't ever let anyone tell you you're too big a nerd. Eventually, you could end up as a character in the most played MMO in the world.

Ian got his 15 minutes. But what, exactly, does a person do with their lives when their big claim to fame is bringing up continuity errors to video game developers?

After The Fame

They keep doing it.

Do you know someone who, even after all these years, is still the exact person they were in high school? That's where Ian Bates is at with his fame. He began as the guy asking hyper-specific Warcraft questions at a convention Q&A and is still that person as of BlizzCon 2014. Here are the questions he's asked since his world debut in 2010:

2011:

2012: (Ian did not ask a question this year; he was too busy crushing pussy.)

2013:

2014:

What's impressive is that his questions rattle the Blizzard panelists every single time. They squirm in their seats and give each other "No, you talk" looks. In those moments they're all thinking the same thing: Why haven't we thought about the game as much as this guy has?

None of these are situations like the classic SNL sketch where William Shatner lays into Star Trek fans when they ask obsessive questions about Captain Kirk. Ian's asking well-thought-out questions to the only people on Earth who should be expected to answer them off the top of their heads -- people who craft every millimeter of that fictional world and know it inside and out. But once a year this red-clad mad man enters their lives with his big swinging dick and makes them look like nervous stoners that a high school chemistry teacher woke from a nap to make them answer a question about covalent bonds.

You can especially hear it in the BlizzCon 2014 Q&A. Here's a transcript of the first three words exchanged between Ian and a Blizzard panelist when Ian stepped up to the mic:

Ian: "Hello."

Blizzard Person: "Oh shit."

See that? You know what that is?

Fear.

2 Amy's Baking Company Is No More

Amy's Baking Company opened in 2008. Two years later, blogger and foodie Joel LaTondress wrote a harsh one-star Yelp review. He wasn't impressed with the pizza crust and thought the sauce tasted store-bought. He even mentioned a tense encounter with Amy's husband and restaurant co-owner, Samy.

In response to a negative review, some restaurant owners take to Yelp to apologize. Or they might let the comment slide, resigned to the fact that you can't please all of the people all of the time. Amy and Samy took a different approach in 2010: They went on a fucking warpath that started a chain reaction of ludicrous events that finally ended in 2015.

Amy and Samy responded to LaTondress by calling him a moron. They must have felt proud of themselves for doing it, so they brought that same hostility to anyone who left negative reviews. This led to a bad reputation, which, of course, led to Gordon Ramsay.

Amy's Baking Company caught the eye of the celebrity chef, who thought the little dysfunctional eatery in Scottsdale, Arizona, would be perfect for his Fox reality show, Kitchen Nightmares -- a program in which an Englishman screams at dumb people's food. If you like watching footage of natural disasters laying waste to cities, you'll LOVE the Amy's Baking Company episode of Kitchen Nightmares. It's the best:

Amy and Samy didn't come off too well. Turns out they belittled their staff, withheld their employees' hard-earned tips, and were hostile toward anything with a pulse. At one point Samy almost gets into a fistfight with a customer who had the audacity to ask when he would get the pizza he'd been waiting on for an hour. The episode ends with Amy calling the whole thing off. The second half of the show, where Ramsay fixes all the restaurant's problems (temporarily, at least), was never filmed. The entire episode above is 43 minutes of drama that usually happens in the first 15 minutes of every other episode of the series.

Things weren't looking good for Amy's Baking Company. And then Reddit got involved, if you were wondering how this ties into Internet fame. (Or infamy, in this case.) It then escalated to a new level of absurdity.

In thread after thread, Redditors had a blast mocking the insanity of the Kitchen Nightmares episode. Amy's never seen a negative comment she didn't unhinge her jaw and try to swallow, so she got into it with a Web community of millions. In response, Redditors would do weird shit, like call the restaurant and ask if they served Battletoads.

That kind of silly stuff would lead to Amy writing Facebook posts like this:

And this:

Other than one minor blip in 2014 when Samy was caught on camera trying to stab a customer with a knife ...

... all was calm and all was well with Amy's Baking Company.

After The Fame

It took a while, but it finally happened: Amy's Baking Company closed its doors in July 2015.

Amy claims the closing had nothing to do with negative press, citing issues with the former landlord as the reason. But that's too mundane a reason to close shop. It's like how Al Capone was brought down by a tax-evasion charge. Logic dictates that you're not going to get too many repeat customers if you follow up a televised attempted beating of a customer with an attempted stabbing of a customer. No one's saying, "Wait, I can get a bad slice of pizza and get assaulted by the owner? Do I need reservations? I MUST EAT AT THIS WONDERFUL ESTABLISHMENT!"

1 Jessi Slaughter's Life Was Hell, And Now He Identifies As Male

Prepare for a story where no one comes off as the good guy.

You probably know Jessi Slaughter and her pissed-off dad from the "Ya Dun Goofed" video:

Jessi lived her life online. She was an active participant in teenage Internet drama and had a history of posting nude photos online. She was an atypical troubled preteen, and she documented it for the Internet to see.

Jessi was 11 in the now-famous video. Like a lot of the viral videos I feature in this series, "Ya Dun Goofed" was a huge hit and made the usual viral video rounds: late-night talk shows, newscasts, all the top blogs, etc. It's a viral gold mine. Teenage angst, wild overreactions, catchphrases that were delivered fully ready to be memed ("Ya Dun Goofed!" "Cyberpolice!" "Consequences will never be the same!"), and it had characters that were tailor-made for parody videos. It's like it was borne from countless viral marketing meetings. It's Chris Crocker's "Leave Britney Alone" video, but if Crocker's blue-collar dad were in the background screaming comically outlandish threats to no one in particular.

It all began as gossipy middle school drama. Jessi was embroiled in one of those emotionally charged preteen "she's such a slut" rumors on StickyDrama, a website where teen girls congregate to gossip and generally be mean to each other. Jessi posted a video on YouTube in an attempt to defend herself from the rumors. The video made its way onto 4chan.

Shockingly, 4chan users did not offer her sympathy and a shoulder to cry on. They made her life hell. Prank calls, death threats, slut-shaming, social media hacking -- every tactic from the Spineless Internet Troll Handbook. It was cyberbullying on a scale previously unseen on an individual.

Jessi recorded a second, tearful video where she tried to express how miserable these faceless people had made her life. Her dad stepped into frame and delivered a monologue of his own. The resulting mega-hit viral video we all know and love was, originally, a direct response to a faceless Internet mob terrorizing a troubled preteen girl who couldn't stop publishing her life on the Internet.

After The Fame

In March 2011, Jessi's father, Gene, was arrested on child abuse charges after allegedly having punched Jessi in the face during an argument. Months later, Jessi was in foster care, away from her mother and father, with no Internet privileges.

On Aug. 11, 2011, while in foster care, Jessi posted a video apologizing to everyone she hurt and dragged into the gigantic clusterfuck of the previous year:

Later that same day, her father died of a massive heart attack.

Some things have changed since then. Jessi is no longer in foster care and is living with her mom again. The bigger change is that Jessi is no longer Jessi. She prefers to be called Damien and identifies as a man. Damien still gets harassed by Internet bullies, but his life is much less dramatic than it once was.

He gave YouTube another try, but apparently it wasn't for him. The YouTube account still exists, but the videos he originally uploaded have all been removed. Not because they were profane tirades, as they once were. Playing with a dog, talking about favorite bands -- normal, boring Internet stuff that attracted a lot of residual hate. But in the videos he apparently looked happier than ever, so there's that.

It's not much, but for now, that's the happiest ending this story could have.

Luis is hunting Numa Numa Guy for sport. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.

Check up on more of your favorite internet celebrities and read What 5 Internet Celebrities Did After They Got Famous to hear the homeless man with the golden voice and also check out what Rebecca Black's been up to in What 4 Internet Celebrities Did After They Got Famous (Part 2).

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