Liam Sullivan is laughing. Standing on the stage in New York’s The Zipper Theater in a ratty blonde wig and a pleather jacket, he’s supposed to be opening for Margaret Cho. But he’s laughing. He’s supposed to be singing about shoes, but the situation keeps making him laugh. He struggles to stifle his giggles, and eventually finishes his performance.
After the high-profile show, he’ll slip back into anonymity, because when Liam Sullivan walks down the street, no one recognizes him. Only when he logs onto the Internet or dons the blonde wig does 34-year-old Sullivan become recognizable as his most famous character, a teenage girl named Kelly.
Sullivan and his alter-ego are part of a new breed of talent that is redefining celebrity in today’s culture, because his spot in the pop culture consciousness didn’t come in the typical Hollywood manner; Sullivan’s fame came from YouTube.
His first video to catch the attention of viral video enthusiasts was “Shoes,” a video in which Sullivan, dressed as Kelly, sings a choppy techno song about – you guessed it – shoes.
“Yeah, it’s totally weird,” he said.
It has been viewed more than 8 million times on YouTube, and his latest Kelly video, “Let Me Borrow That Top,” has been viewed more than 3 million times.
It only seems natural that Kelly has been so popular and made so many people laugh – after all, Sullivan still finds himself laughing at Kelly today.
Becoming Kelly
A year and a half ago, there was no Kelly.
Sullivan has been doing comedy for about 10 years; he was just another actor in L.A. when the idea for Kelly materialized. He was working on a skit involving a teenage girl, but he couldn’t get it to work. He had the character’s voice down, but he couldn’t find a way to make her funny. Then, at a party, he met a girl obsessed with shoes. She talked for a while about how much she spent on shoes, and then pointed to her own shoes, saying “These shoes cost $300.”
Later, Sullivan said, “I was on a walk, looking at my feet, and I just somehow just started saying ‘shoes’ in her voice.” The sound of the voice saying “shoes” in rhythm with his feet struck Sullivan as funny. “I ran home and wrote the song in like 15 minutes. It made me laugh,” he said. Kelly was then born.
Using the software program GarageBand to make the music, and relying heavily on his friends to be Kelly’s friends and family, Sullivan made the video that would soon launch him to Internet stardom.
“It’s kinda cool, ’cause it’s not like some company hired me to do this. I came up with it. I put it all together,” he said.
The success wasn’t immediate. Sullivan originally posted the video for “Shoes,” as well as some other videos, on his personal Web site, liamshow.com, unaware that YouTube even existed.
“Some of (my) videos, like the muffin video, a guy posted it (on YouTube) before I even knew about it. It got like 15 million views, and I was like, ‘that’s sick,’” he said.
Sullivan realized the potential YouTube held, and decided to post his videos on the increasingly popular video site himself. Within months, millions of people had laughed along to his videos.
Sullivan is laughing along as well, because he enjoys playing Kelly.
“The character’s pretty crazy. When I just thought of her, I thought it was really funny, and putting the outfit together was pretty funny. And then the voice and all the little things she does…it cracks me up,” he said. “It still cracks me up.”
For Sullivan, he said the best part about playing Kelly is making people laugh.
“That’s what it’s all about for me. I love when people who’ve never seen her before flip out when they see it,” he said. “I love those kinds of moments.”
Of course, dressing in drag for a living has its downsides, as well. The tights that Kelly wears, for example, are very constricting, Sullivan said.
“When you dress as a girl, you get a sense of how hard it is to be a girl. Just putting clothes on for the day, you’ve got to be an artist. You’ve got to know what matches, what doesn’t match, what matches too much. You’ve got to know what you look best in. You can’t wear the same thing twice. I wear a little skirt and tights, and you feel kind of exposed,” he said. “It must be hard to be a girl.”
Fame? What fame?
Sullivan doesn’t consider himself a YouTube “star.” He thinks of himself as simply another YouTube user. But millions of YouTube users would disagree.
Kelly and her songs, from “Shoes” to “Txt Msg Brkup,” have launched dozens of fan groups on the social networking site Facebook and an Internet fansite, betchslap.com.
Fans have dressed up as Kelly for Halloween, and a number of parody videos on YouTube, such as “Brains” and “Jews,” poke fun at “Shoes.”
“I think it’s great. It’s so funny. I love that so many people are so into this character that they dress up as her and imitate her,” he said. “That came out of my head!”
More Than Just “Muffins”
Sullivan isn’t alone in his fame – YouTube seems to be a breeding ground for new talent. Lisa Donovan, known as Lisa Nova on YouTube, appeared on “MADtv” as a featured player in early 2007, after her comedic videos gained popularity. Esmée Denters, famous for her YouTube renditions of popular songs, received a record deal and recently appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
But while YouTube has the ability to make someone well-known, the fact remains that being a YouTube star doesn’t pay the bills. Because YouTube is an entirely free service, Sullivan hasn’t made any money off of people viewing his video millions of times. Instead, he sells Kelly’s songs on iTunes and sells merchandise on his Web site, and now he’s touring with Margaret Cho.
And Sullivan admits that there’s more to life than just Kelly.
“I would like at some point to do something different. I can’t do this for 20 years – it’ll be stupid. But if I’m known for this, then I think that’s perfectly OK. It’s a really funny thing. If this is like what it’s going to be for me for the rest of my life, I can live with that.”
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