![]() ![]() I remember Tana Mongeau was getting backlash last year because she wasn’t making a public video apologizing, and I was like, Well, how do we all know she didn’t reach out personally and apologize? Why is it so important that we get a video of her apologizing to someone else? At the end of the day, it’s a commentary on this independent social-media sphere that fuels so much of this outrage and backlash. You read the comments, and people are just taking stuff like ‘So-and-so had a cup of coffee today’ and going, ‘How!? Why would they ever do that?!?!?!?’ So I’m making fun of how these nonstories are presented and framed in this way that ends up generating all this outrage. This is all soft journalism, and a lot of the time it’s just presented with such seriousness, and people take it so seriously. I didn’t go to journalism school, but I’m aware of the differentiation between hard and soft journalism. “They’re the most banal and irrelevant stories that anybody could be talking about. ➽ What He Thinks of the Stories He Covers Tune in to Good One every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can read excerpts from the interview or listen to the episode below. On Vulture’s Good One podcast, Feitosa discusses the acute challenges of creating satire on the context-stripping internet for an audience that sometimes lacks comedy literacy. And not unlike The Colbert Report–era Stephen Colbert (one of the channel’s biggest influences), the amount of Feitosa that’s present in Def Noodles is constantly shifting, which can make him even more infuriating. If you find him annoying, then to him, you are finding what he is satirizing annoying, which makes it a success. ![]() Or they’ll point out how he’ll sometimes note that stories are “serious,” even though he says the point is that it’s all “irrelevant.” But to Feitosa, that’s the character. They’ll point out that Feitosa says he doesn’t care about the goings-on he covers, and yet he spends 16 hours a day following every movement of fringe celebrities. When people criticize him, it’s because they believe he is hiding behind his character. In fairness, Feitosa doesn’t exactly make it easy. Def Noodles is a test to see if satire, irony, and paradox can work on the internet, and the results are decidedly mixed. In turn, a subset of the online commentariat responds with cold air, arguing that it’s Def Noodles who is the actual hypocrite. Not up for debate is the fact that he functions as an agent of chaos: Feitosa’s character blows hot air, pointing out hypocrisy, ridiculousness, and dangerous behavior among the YouTuber set. But since last March, when lockdown forced him to focus his efforts on the internet, the 25-year-old’s online persona of Def Noodles has taken off as a drama channel, a drama-channel parody, or both, depending on whom you ask. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture Photo Courtesy of Dennis Feitosaīefore the pandemic, Dennis Feitosa was a comedian struggling to make it in L.A. ![]()
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