Meet the most hilarious people ever to lose their jobs, friends, livelihoods, and their dignity—all for your personal amusement

FRAMED The stars of YouTube didn't choose to be famous

The following is an excerpt from the March/April issue of Radar, on newsstands now. To get a risk-free copy of the print magazine delivered to your doorstep, click here!

Marylynn Aminrazavi was happy. She was on vacation. Decked out in beach casual—oversized white T-shirt, colorful beach towel, hair in a bun—she leaned back in a chair by the Atlantic Ocean, put on her daughter's iPod, and closed her eyes. Lost in the music, she began to sing along. Loudly.

The song was Boyz II Men's "I'll Make Love to You." Aminrazavi's thin, nasal warble—not to mention her physique (she looks like your mom)—was clearly never intended for mid-90s R&B sex-pop. The resulting scene was comic gold: A 46-year-old suburban mother of two, blissfully unaware, belting out "I'll make love to you / Like you want me to" to the dozens of beachgoers around her.

In April 2003, as if the life of a doughy teenager named Ghyslain weren't hard enough, one of his fellow students found his videotape, digitized it, and placed the clip online. Since then, the "STAR WARS Kid" has been viewed 900 million timesHad someone not had the presence of mind to capture the moment with a digital camera, it would have been lost forever. For one minute and 13 seconds of screen time, Aminrazavi sings with disarming sincerity, until the laughter of those around her finally overcomes the insulation of her iPod earbuds.

Warily, she opens her eyes. Waves of fear and shock ripple across her face as she spots the camera and realizes that her internal reverie has, in fact, been quite public. Mortified, she hides her eyes, erupts into laughter, and apologizes to her neighbors on the beach: "I'm so embarrassed."

BOYZ II MOM Marylynn Aminrazavi in "Singing on the Beach"

It was only the beginning. The video, recorded in July 2005, made its way onto YouTube bearing the title "Singing on the Beach." In October of last year, Good Morning America featured it on the air as a YouTube video of the week. Since then, it has been viewed 1.3 million times and ranks as one of the site's most-viewed comedy clips of all time. More than 3,000 people have left comments, many along the lines of, "fake singing white fat typical american bitch, shut the fuck up and eat some burgers."

"Now I know how Paris Hilton feels," says Aminrazavi, who works for a health-care firm in Northern Virginia and is studying to become a nurse practitioner. "That's one of my worst moments. It's really bizarre and embarrassing. Every time I go to class, people start singing 'I'll Make Love to You.'" Her husband is a teacher, and his students have seen the clip. At a work meeting shortly after the video took off, her coworkers flashed copies of a Boyz II Men CD. Prior to becoming one of its most sought-after celebrities, Aminrazavi had never heard of YouTube. Asked during a telephone interview what she'd like to say to the person behind her public humiliation, Aminrazavi replies, "I'm going to smack him as soon as I get off the phone."

The quick-witted auteur who captured her indiscretion was her 14-year-old son, Arya. "He's having a good time with it," says Aminrazavi, who has endured the humiliation with a smile so that the teen—who aspires to work in film one day—can get some attention for his other YouTube videos. After GMA featured the clip, Arya watched with glee as the hits rolled in. "He was watching and said, 'Oh, Mom, it's 1,000; now it's 2,000,'" Aminrazavi says. "I was dying."

When Time magazine named "You" as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute "user-generated content" as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the mindhive, each confessional post or exploding-Mentos video a bid for attention and celebrity. But there's a curious thing about the new Internet fame generators: The most wildly successful clips often feature unwilling participants. According to research by the Viral Factory, a marketing firm that specializes in viral videos, four of the top 10 most-watched online videos ever feature private or semi-private moments that were, like Aminrazavi's performance at the beach, never intended for a wide audience. Their protagonists are, by and large, regular people who woke up one morning to find that their lowest moments had been caught on camera and distributed to the snickering online hordes.

If you're not careful, you could be next.

Patient Zero of the phenomenon is an overweight 19-year-old Canadian named Ghyslain Raza. His journey toward global humiliation began in 2003, so predated the rise of YouTube, but the video—it's almost statistically impossible that you haven't seen it—is archived there for posterity. He is the Star Wars kid. In November 2002, while hanging out alone in the AV room at his Quebec high school, Raza videotaped himself imitating the martial arts moves of Darth Maul, using a long golf ball retriever for a light sabre. The performance is deadly serious. Raza's desperation to inhabit the body of a powerful, fearsome Jedi is palpable, and he pursues the clumsy swordplay with an abandon that can only be achieved by those confident of their privacy. Unfortunately for him, he left the videotape in the machine. In April 2003, as if the life of a doughy teenager named Ghyslain weren't hard enough, one of his fellow students found it, digitized it, and placed the clip online. Since then, it has been viewed 900 million times, according to the Viral Factory. It's difficult to think of anything else, ever, that 900 million people have seen.

THE FORCE IS AGAINST HIM Ghyslain Raza as the Star Wars Kid

Within months of the video's appearance on the Web, Raza and his parents filed a $200,000 lawsuit against the three classmates he accused of posting the video. According to documents filed in that case, which was settled last year for an undisclosed amount, the humiliation made school "unbearable" for Raza. His classmates would point at him and chant "Star Wars kid!" He was diagnosed with depression, and eventually dropped out and engaged the services of a private tutor. Aside from a few brief statements by e-mail in 2003, he has never spoken with reporters.

Raza soon found comrades in online ignominy. In early 2005, Gary Brolsma, then a 19-year-old Staples employee from Saddle Brook, New Jersey, exploded onto the Internet. According to what may or may not be a legitimate interview with him posted at a tribute website, garybrolsma.net, he became fascinated with a song called "Dragostea Din Tei," by the Romanian techno-pop band O-Zone. The song, whose title translates as "Love Among the Linden Leaves," is a catchy-yet-mournful, epically melodic anthem with a thump-thump bass line and a chorus that The Believer magazine describes as "in precisely the range that huge legions of drunk people can sing easily." That chorus goes like this: "Numa numa yay / Numa numa yay / Numa numa numa yay."

Brolsma thought it would be funny to sit at his webcam-equipped computer and lip-synch to "Dragostea Din Tei." He was right. In an impeccably choreographed performance, he becomes the song—bouncing his heavyset frame to the beat, waving his arms madly but precisely, and flawlessly registering every overwrought Romanian vocalization on his silly-putty face. The effect is sublime and hysterical—a fat kid from New Jersey executing this utterly alien-sounding, bizarrely memorable song with the confidence of a virtuoso. Thinking his friends might like to see the video, he posted it online. It has since been viewed more than 200 million times, according to the Viral Factory's top 10 tally. Brolsma tried to ride the wave of attention, appearing on Good Morning America, but ended up, according to the New York Times, "embarrassed," "moping around the house," and "shuttling back and forth" between his parents' house and work. He canceled a Today Show interview and stopped returning reporters' phone calls.

STUNT TROUBLE Mark A. Hicks as Afroninja

The logic of collective ridicule is, at bottom, inscrutable. Yes, "Star Wars Kid" is funny, but why did Raza's sweaty, awkward gyrations snowball into a global cultural touchstone rather than die after a few forwarded e-mails in Canada? Why did Aminrazavi's careless sing-along catch fire? Why, of all things, "Numa Numa" (as Brolsma's dance has been dubbed)? It is as though the fickle gods plucked these sad souls at random to have some fun with them. After Raza and Brolsma, the floodgates opened, and virtually every week has seen another private error or foolish moment datacast to the world. You could get in an argument with a stranger on a bus. Or you could disastrously try your hand as a sportscaster on a college station. Or you could accidentally shoot yourself. With 780 million camera phones sold worldwide in the last two years, no one is safe from senseless and random ridicule. The surveillance state we've been fretting about for so many years has snuck up on us. But it's not concerned with political control. It just wants to see people screw up.

One of its reluctant stars is called Afroninja. He stands, relaxed and confident, in what looks like an empty office with a drop cloth hung on the rear wall, clad in a loose-fitting martial-arts outfit and holding a pair of nunchucks in each hand. He looks at the camera, offers a teeth-baring snarl, and launches his body comfortably into a backflip.

"The toughest thing was when my family saw it," says Hicks of the Afroninja video. "To lose respect with them, which is what it felt like—that was tough"He doesn't land it. His feet sail over his head gracefully, but halfway through the maneuver his body stops, pauses momentarily, and plummets downward, face-first. People gasp. As if following some instinctual mandate to save face, the clearly woozy Afroninja gets up, flails his nunchucks, and careens off camera to the sound of an upended table.

The clip lasts 15 seconds. The slapstick of the doomed backflip is flawless, and the hopeless attempt to redeem it is downright Chaplinesque. Here is this man with a self-important swagger attempting to appear fearsome and adroit, and instead he looks like a fool. People find this sort of thing funny. When "Afroninja" was posted, it was viewed 80 million times—placing it roughly on par with the final episode of Cheers in terms of audience. According to the Viral Factory, the video ranks ninth among the most-watched online clips ever. Somewhere, as it metastasized across the Internet, someone came up with the moniker. It stuck.

Afroninja's real name is Mark A. Hicks. He's a seasoned and successful Los Angeles-based stuntman with credits in more than 40 films and 60 commercials. He served as stunt-double to Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour films, and won the Best Fight category at the 2002 World Stunt Awards. The infamous clip was from Hicks's July 2004 audition to appear in a Nike commercial called "Chamber of Fear" with LeBron James.

Six weeks after the audition, Hicks learned that, despite an 18-year career spent climbing the Hollywood ladder, it was his errant kung fu move that made him a star. He was breaking for a midnight dinner on the Los Angeles set of xXx: State of the Union when a friend called.

"She was cracking up," Hicks says. "She said, 'I just saw your audition on Jay Leno.'" The chinny late-night comic had gone to the online well for material, and he'd found "Afroninja."

"See, that's a true athlete," Leno said. "I like how he tries to save it, like, 'Maybe I can pull this off—whoa!'"

Hicks had no idea until Leno's airing of the clip that it had lived beyond the audition room. "I was sick to my stomach," Hicks says. "I couldn't eat. Because I've fought all my life to gain credibility and respect."

Among the many ironies of Hicks's unwilling and unbidden transformation into Afroninja is the fact that he got the part. What actually happened in the audition is this: It was a second callback for Hicks, to a casting agency he'd worked with many times before. He'd just returned from a shoot in Hong Kong and was jet-lagged. "I just missed," he says. His chin and nose hit the floor, after which point his memory is a bit fuzzy. "I was pretty much out on my feet at that point. I think I bumped into a tray on a table. They asked me if I was okay. I apologized, got up, dusted myself off, got a drink of water, went back and jumped up, kicked the ceiling, and did a 360-degree spinning hook." Hicks knew that every gymnast screws up a move now and again, and that the casting agency and other stuntmen waiting outside the audition room viewed him as a professional. He shook off the gaffe and left confident he would book the job. "I knew I was better than anyone else there," he says.

But to Leno's audience, and to the tens of millions who would eventually watch "Afroninja" on YouTube and dozens of other video sites, he was a joke. "LOL poor idiot," wrote one YouTube commentor. "U R very stealthy and stupid dumbass ha ha," wrote another. "Dis man is a failure," wrote a third.

It was devastating. His usually frenetic work pace slackened, Hicks says, because people in Hollywood recognized him as Afroninja and didn't want to risk hiring him to do complicated and dangerous stunt work. "It hurt my credibility with people who didn't know my skill level," he says. "I heard it from everyone. Every stunt person, assistant director, stunt coordinator—even the directors and the producers—were coming to me and saying, 'You're the Afroninja.' I think I was not considered for a lot of things because I was portrayed as a goofball. Respect is huge in the stunt world, especially for an African American, because the industry idea of what a stuntman should be is a good ol' boy."

Even Chris Tucker seems to have abandoned him. "They're doing Rush Hour III," says Hicks, "and I'm not in it. I think that's a direct result of this video." He doesn't know who is responsible for first posting it online, but he assumes it was someone affiliated with the agency that created the ad, which he declines to name (Advertising Age credits it to Wieden and Kennedy). He and his lawyer discussed tracking down and suing the culprit, but eventually the idea was dropped. "I just sort of endured it," he says with a sigh. "The audacity that someone would put this out on the Internet without regard to me, that just blew me away. I wanted to kill the guy."

Hicks has enough perspective to understand that "Afroninja" is funny. "It has a certain magic to it," he says. "I think every now and then everything just comes together—the timing, the cool approach, the Buckwheat-looking hair. The whole thing was perfect." And he doesn't really mind the people who recognize him on the street. What is hard, he says, is knowing that people close to him—his colleagues, his loved ones—saw him, for that 15 seconds, as a fool. "The toughest thing was when my family saw it," he says. "I do a lot of things for my family, and I make more money than anyone in my family. To lose respect with them, which is what it felt like—that was tough." When his wife saw it, he says, he threw a chair at the wall.

"People like to look at people being humiliated," says Mike Parker, the lead project coordinator for eBaum's World, a schlock-joke site that hosts hundreds of look-at-this-jackass videos submitted by viewers. (The site was an early popularizer of "Afroninja"; the fungibility of digital video is such that popular clips get seeded from sites like eBaum's World to YouTube and back again.)

The site claims one million visitors a day and $10 million per year in revenue. Eric Bauman, who founded it in 1998 as a 17-year-old high-school student in Rochester, New York, first gained publicity by posting an audio clip of one of his high-school teachers, Mrs. Barnes, ranting and raving after Bauman and his friends had driven her to hysterics in class. Parker says Barnes suffered "physical problems" and "mental problems" as a result of the clip's popularity.

The closest thing Parker can cite to a guiding principle of what makes a humiliating video globally hilarious is that people like to see how others behave when they think no one's watching. "One of the things that makes it viral is that it's people being caught off guard," he says. "Completely off guard. They're doing their thing, thinking no one's going to see it, and now, boom! It's everywhere."

GROWING PAINS Miracle Jackson

Parker doesn't have much of a conscience when it comes to the resonance of that boom in the lives of people who have been caught unawares. "It's tough," he says. "That's the business we're in. But you do feel for these people. Eric feels for his teacher. He feels sorry for what he did, but he doesn't regret it." As an example of the line eBaum's World won't cross, Parker cites the video of an overweight seventh-grader named Miracle Jackson captured at a school talent show. During her anemic, comically low-energy dance act, the crowd first laughs and then begins facetiously cheering her on. "The school asked us to take it down," Parker says. "I think we did." As of this writing, "Introducing Miracle Jackson: Watch Her Unbelievable Dance Moves!" can still be seen at eBaum's World. On YouTube, it's been viewed more than 60,000 times.

Bauman's "prank" on Barnes indicates an emerging facet of YouTube humiliation—the tactic of deliberately provoking a teacher or coworker into a rage for the express purpose of posting the resulting drama online. A search for "screaming teacher" turns up dozens of clips on the site. The most celebrated case involved an as-yet-unnamed teacher in Quebec whose class goaded him into an outburst in November. The 32-year veteran, who specialized in teaching kids with discipline problems, went on stress leave after the video hit YouTube. Though it has since been taken down at the request of the school—which banned camera phones after the incident—it has sparked a wider, global debate about the wisdom of allowing cell phones in class. Quebec is now considering banning them in schools throughout the province, and Scotland's largest teachers' union called for barring them from classrooms in December.

SELF LOVE Aleksey Vayner in "Impossible Is Nothing"

Being "caught off guard"—or catching someone else and bludgeoning him over the head with a worldwide audience he never could have imagined—doesn't explain all the appeal of YouTube's reluctant stars. There's also the element of punishment—a sort of digital tarring and feathering of people for trying to be something they're not. Aminrazavi's performance caught on in part because there was a massive audience eager to mock a heavy white woman for daring to sing R&B. However briefly, Aminrazavi had attempted to step outside her role as a lame suburban mom, and YouTube was there&mdsh;her own son was there—to put her in her place.

"Imagine how hard it is to walk into a room with 200 cops and they all point at you because you made a mistake. Imagine the 16-year-old working at Panera Bread says, 'Hey, you're the cop who shot himself"So it was with Aleksey Vayner, the 23-year-old Uzbek Yale student who—if you believe the video résumé he sent to investment banking firm UBS—can bench press 495 pounds, serve a 140-mph tennis ball, crack a stack of bricks with his bare hand, dance with passion and grace, and generally be a "model of personal development to those around him." The ludicrously self-inflating video, titled "Impossible Is Nothing," turned Vayner into a national laughingstock, earning him coverage on the Today Show and a profile in the New York Times. The clip has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube—the precise number is impossible to discern—and sparked a round of blog-centered Vayner-bashing at Yale. His sudden notoriety brought his life to a standstill. "Initially it was a shock," he says. "You freeze, you're unable to function. Then I felt scared. It's not just joking, mocking e-mails I'm getting. It's people wishing to beat me, throw me out of school, deport me. It puts tremendous strain on your family and friendships. Prior to this experience, I had phenomenal relationships with mentors, which I had listed on my résumé. After this, they've been harassed so much they want nothing to do with me."

The furor over Vayner's résumé was occasioned by the easily documented falsehoods contained therein—the sample chapter of his book about the Holocaust, Women's Silent Tears, that he posted online was plagiarized; the address for the charity he founded does not exist; and so on—and Vayner is adamantly unrepentant about the claims he made. "I do not see at all any portion of that video being comical," he says. "People mistake confidence for arrogance. I don't regret making it, and there was nothing to be ashamed of." But what's the appropriate punishment for a 23-year-old kid who makes stuff up on his résumé? "The doors to Wall Street are closed," Vayner says. "I still haven't gotten a job. Sometimes I feel like everything I've done up until now has been ruined."

KEYSTONE COP Lee Paige shows that accidents can, and do, happen

Similarly humiliated was Lee Paige, a dreadlocked Drug Enforcement Administration special agent and former Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive back. Paige, a 17-year veteran of the DEA whose career has included undercover work, seven armed confrontations in the line of duty, and death threats from a Colombian drug cartel, occasionally participated in youth outreach programs for the agency. In 2004, he delivered a gun safety lecture to a Florida youth group. He's an imposing smooth talker, and during the presentation he took a tough-guy approach. After an assistant handed him a pistol, he brandished it and barked, "This is a Glock .40. Fifty Cent, Too $hort, all of them talk about Glock .40s. I'm the only one professional enough in this room that I know of to carry a Glock .40." Then he shot himself in the leg.

Though the videotape was confiscated and erased by the DEA, the clip still somehow made its way onto YouTube. It has been seen at least 300,000 times. According to a lawsuit Paige has filed against the agency—he believes someone within it is responsible for the leak—he, his wife, and their children have become "target[s] of jokes, derision, ridicule, and disparaging comments ... by people at restaurants, grocery stores, and airports," and "white supremacy organizations have used the videotape to ridicule black Americans in general and Mr. Paige in particular." When asked for comment, Paige would say only, "Imagine how hard it is to walk into a room with 200 other cops at a roundup, and they all point at you because you made a mistake. Imagine the 16-year-old working at Panera Bread says, 'Hey, you're the cop who shot himself.'"

A WHITE COLLAR CRIME Ethan Chandler as a buttoned-down Bono

Perhaps the most mercilessly ridiculed YouTube victim is Ethan Chandler, a soft-spoken 32-year-old musician and bank manager in Manhattan. Last August, he was asked by his bosses at Bank of America to come up with some branded entertainment for a corporate gathering at the Delaware headquarters of MBNA, another bank that had just merged with Bank of America. "We were asked to put something together around the theme of unity, around two companies coming together, that kind of thing," says Chandler. "People above my boss, they knew that I sang." Chandler's superiors gave him an approved list of songs to use, and he chose U2's "One," for which he penned more appropriate lyrics—instead of "Love is the answer / Love, the higher law," for instance, Chandler came up with "We'll make lots of money / ... We'll live out our core values." Accompanied by a colleague on guitar, Chandler performed the song before a group of about 40 executives in a conference room and received a standing ovation. The performance is deeply odd. Chandler's voice is earnest and powerful; he appears to be pouring everything he has into a song about MBNA's sports-branded credit cards. In a collared shirt and tie, he stands on a PowerPoint presentation-ready stage, closes his eyes, and, with the microphone gripped tenderly in his hand, sings "integration's never had us feeling so good" like he really, really means it.

Bank of America records corporate gatherings. According to Chandler, an amused employee of the contractor hired to tape his performance leaked it to YouTube, where it's been seen more than half a million times. After pitiless mocking from blogs like Gawker, Adfreak, and the New York Times's Dealbook, Chandler eventually made it to VH1's Best Week Ever and onto the front page of Yahoo under the headline, "Bono the Banker." But the star was among the last to know that he had become the personification of what one Gawker commentor described as corporate "douchebaggery." Asked if any friends had alerted him to his newfound fame, Chandler, who doesn't read blogs, says with a laugh, "No—and that was bizarre. I guess I don't have any friends."

The clip was out there for 45 days before he realized what had happened.

"Associates were sending e-mails, 'Hey we saw the clip at our staff meeting,'" says Chandler. "You know, 'Great song, great job.' But then a person from Rhode Island sent an e-mail saying, 'Don't worry about what they're saying on the Internet.' And I was like, 'Whoa. Wait a minute, what do you mean?'" What she meant was that hundreds of thousands of people had been laughing behind Chandler's back for more than a month. "I was just completely blown away," he says. "I was just like, what happened here?"

Chandler, who hired a publicist to accommodate the press requests and promote his real music career in the wake of the leak, is decidedly unemotional in discussing the clip's popularity. He has the bearing one might expect of a bank manager: reserved, discreet, professional, and balding. "Contrary to what the bloggers think, I'm not ashamed," he says. "I don't carry any great grief or shame over what happened. I was singing. I was doing my thing, and I'm not embarrassed about that." The only time he allows a touch of anger over what has been done to him enter his voice is when he speculates as to why someone would post the video in the first place. "Who would do that? Who would leak it, and what was the intent? Was it malicious? That question is still unanswered." He says no Bank of America executives acknowledged the fiasco to him—no notes, no flowers, no pats on the back. "I think their approach has been 'The less we pay attention to it, the quicker it will go away,'" he says.

Chandler, who has sold songs to EMI Music Publishing, self-released an album in 2002 called Better Days Ahead and hopes to use this brief spasm of attention to promote a new record he is working on right now. Judging by his demo, his voice is indeed remarkable; the music is pleasant pop-rock that wouldn't sound out of place sandwiched between Counting Crows and Bruce Hornsby on an adult-contemporary radio mix. The refrain of "Rock Star," the first track, is "You came from nothing and now you're something / Like you always dreamed it would be / But you're lonely there / So lonely there."

AMERICAN IDOL Gary Brolsma in "Dragostea Din Tei"

The irony in both Chandler's and Hicks's experiences, of course, is that both men have sought celebrity for years, only to have it pounce on them ferociously and out of nowhere. Like Chandler, Hicks is attempting to jujitsu his battle with the YouTube onslaught into legitimate celebrity (Brolsma, too, has recently produced a new video, called "New Numa," in the hopes of attracting attention to his band, the Nowadays). As strange as it sounds coming from someone who felt robbed of his dignity by the Afroninja sobriquet, Hicks has decided, at the urging of a friend, to produce and star in a film called Afroninja: Destiny, wherein a "nice guy who finishes last tries to help someone, and gets on the Internet looking stupid. Then he inherits the warrior spirit of his father and becomes Afroninja—this badass guy." It remains to be seen, of course, whether Afroninja: Destiny will redeem Hicks's reputation, but he has already had an opportunity to capitalize on his misfortune. When Hewlett Packard, which is hopping on the emerging bandwagon of using viral videos as marketing tools, came calling, he talked them up to the mid-five figures. But due to copyright concerns, HP didn't want to actually use the "Afroninja" clip. They asked Hicks to recreate the ineffably timed, unintentionally hilarious move on a set. It's something only a highly skilled stuntman could pull off.

Hicks, who had long since cut his hair, showed up at the shoot. "It was hilarious," he says, "because I'd never met these guys. They didn't know if I was really a buffoon. I popped a perfect backflip first and said, 'That's just so you guys can relax.'"
Then he put on a wig and, with precision and grace, made a fool of himself.