If you’re familiar with the Internet phenomenon Bad Lip Reading, you’ve probably spent a few giddy moments laughing until you cried as a politician spouted absurd non-sequiturs in a mock campaign video, like a schizophrenic man with amazing comedic timing. And I’m right there with you. Who can resist Herman Cain staring at a camera, uncomfortably close, saying, “nachos and hogwash! This is my juice, and I’m hungry. McDonald’s special. Give me a large plate, and I’ll sing, sing, sing about it!” Or Mitt Romney, driving in his car, looking tormented as he stares out the windshield: “Boy, these rappers and their beautiful Mexicans…I gotta keep my mind free.”
Of course, these aren’t the real words of Herman Cain or Mitt Romney. They’re the brainchild of the genius behind Bad Lip Reading, a site that overdubs canned audio on real video to make these politicos speak their strange gibberish. By interpreting the shapes their mouths form, Bad Lip Reading makes the inane chatter look real. The Herman Cain video has done almost two million hits on YouTube, and another featuring Rick Perry (“then I suspended Marsha off this bridge and took a virgin heifer night riding for a while. We never got a dead spirit.”) recently topped the three million mark.
As you’re watching the videos, in the odd moments between gasps for breath, it’s hard to imagine that such a brilliant, simple concept has never been done before. After all, humans form words with their mouths. If you cut off the volume, it looks like they’re forming different words. With the aid of a good impressionist, whole lines of thought and speech can be created from nowhere, distorting reality and creating comedy from scratch.
The man behind Bad Lip Reading remains anonymous. All we know about him, from interviews with the Village Voice and the Washington Post, is that he lives in Texas, produces songs, and writes music. And it took a sad bit of inspiration for the idea to materialize. A few years ago, his mother went deaf and was forced to learn how to read lips. He tried too, impressed by her progress, but the words he saw on the muted television couldn’t possibly have come from the people on screen. They were too strange, too discordant. That’s not how people spoke, and so the seed of the idea was born. Soon he was making videos featuring a radio broadcaster with an odd habit of mouthing words when his partner spoke. His friends loved it, and he made more.
By any amateur online standard, the political videos have been wildly successful. But Bad Lip Reading’s presence on YouTube began with a song. The Bad Lip Reader’s (‘The BLR,’ as I’ll call him for the rest of this article) viral career began when he happened upon the bizarrely popular video for “Friday” by Rebecca Black. Instead of the grating chorus, he saw something totally different. The new interpretation, “Gang Fight,” came out in March 2011. It’s still the most popular of all his videos, with more than four million hits. And no wonder—watching Rebecca Black and her friends shout “gang fight!” like bloodthirsty suburbanites doesn’t get old.
It’s a rudimentary effort, a funny idea with good execution that only hinted at the depth and ambition to come. And that’s the paradox of Bad Lip Reading—while most of the millions of viewers know “Gang Fight” and the political videos, the true creative brilliance comes in the later songs.
Let’s take an example. “Morning Dew,” uploaded last August, features Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and Jay-Z. And stay with me for a second while I try to blow your mind, because here are the facets of its creation. At which point would you be overwhelmed?
1. The BLR has to take bits of music videos featuring the three artists, and put them together in some semblance of a larger narrative.
2. He has to come up with lyrics for each part based on the real words mouthed by the singers. They have to be funny, too, which isn’t a given. The conceit alone isn’t enough to produce comedy, as his failed imitators have shown.
3. He has to arrange the videos and the lyrics so that they form a verse-bridge-chorus structure. Which means that the tempo has to match the video editing.
4. He has to write an entire song that fits the timing and bad lip reading of the video.