Being An Engaging YouTuber Is Surprisingly Difficult

It turns out I’m not that funny unless livestock (or a woman named Karen) is involved.

This week’s post is dedicated to the incredible

Karen Michaels

of The Social Butterfly Buzz. She and I have been meeting on Zoom regularly for no other reason than to just chat.

During our last meeting that dragged on beyond 90 minutes (and realistically could have carried on all day), I was like, “DAMN…we should totally be a YouTube channel.” Yes, we were THAT funny.

PS: If you need anything in the social media arena, she is 100% your go-to gal.

Canva AI image with weird, random things going on with her hand 😂

My life of spontaneous laughter never seems to end, however, the key word here is spontaneous.

Outside of unexpected moments of hilarity, I just can’t force funny. I can’t seem to do it on demand and I envy people who can. Like, standup comedians or brilliant YouTubers.

I’ve tried, oh lord have I tried, but it just doesn’t come.

My less than brilliant YouTubing attempt.

Years ago I had a friend whom I regularly went for lunch with. She was a married, stay-at-home mom and I was the single-for-life crusader. It made for great contrast.

We had all kinds of time during the days to meet for lunches and catch up while her kids were in school.

The topics of conversation we’d come up with were ridiculous. It wasn’t even that we meant to come up with them. It happened organically because everyday life stuff is funny as hell if you really think about it.

Topics like mammograms, sexcapades, parenting, dating, marriage, and so on. We’d spend many hours laughing over the reality of life.

Then, we had the brilliant idea to start a YouTube channel for broadcasting our funniness. Surely other women our age would tune in and laugh at us because let’s face it, we were hilarious…..

Until we sat down in front of a camera.

We were like my dog that does funny tricks until you point a camera at her and then she just sits there licking her butt. You can’t prove funny unless it’s on video and shared over the interwebs, right?

She and I had it all planned out. We bought special wine glasses for our proposed video series, we rigged up the perfect camera setup. And then we sat there — with a whole heap of nothing.

We couldn’t even start a dull conversation, never mind an amusing one.

We sucked as potential YouTubers and our aspirations of going viral flushed right down the toilet. It would never happen on my couch in front of a camera.

So then we went for lunch and became funny again.

My organically brilliant YouTubing attempt.

I think it was mostly funny because there was always some sort of livestock involved.

When I was a destination writer, everything was potential content for my less-than-stellar YouTube channel. I never learned how to make my channel visually appealing but funny? I had that one in the bag.

As a haphazard, adventurous foreigner, the universe never failed to drop a goat with a piece of garbage on its head right in front of me so I could share it with the world.

I didn’t even have to be funny on the road because the universe did it for me and the world laughed along with me.

As a destination blogger, something as basic as driving could be amusing because it’s not uncommon to be trapped in a Jamaican traffic jam a.k.a. stuck behind a herd of cattle on the road.

Catching road crabs in the middle of the night was funny.

Ferrets darting into the road were funny, mostly because I thought they were ferrets but they were actually mongooses (mongeese?)

My most watched video of all time was my neighbor making chicken foot soup in our backyard. The most entertaining part of the whole video is that he made the soup inside a propane tank.

Yup, you heard it here first. He made the soup INSIDE the propane tank and you’d have to see it to believe it. It also helped that he was cutting the toes off dead chicken feet while smoking a joint.

In short, I never ran out of content when it was just everyday life stuff I happened to catch on camera.

When I worked in the restaurant industry I often thought about how much of my daily life could have been a sitcom. My coworkers and I frequently speculated about the hit show we’d have if there were strategically placed cameras set up around us.

However, hilarious moments are more like wild animals in their natural habitat. When we’re just doing what we do there are so many comical and entertaining moments to latch onto.

It’s like a caged lion at the zoo. His specific job is to entertain us but instead, he lays at the back of the cage with a “f**k you” written across his face. Not once have I seen the lions at my city zoo do anything worth filming.

I guess the lesson I’m trying to throw out here is to grab your feel-good moments by the horns and hang onto them.

Don't bet the farm on YouTube because you just might not be that funny. Trust me.

Do you have a YouTube channel? If so, do you think you’re entertaining and engaging, or a total snoozer? 😂

Feel free to drop a link to your channel in the comments but PLEASE…give a brief description of what it’s about. Don’t just drop a blind link.

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Think you might have what it takes to be a fantastic destination writer? Check out Your Other Passport for some slick advice.