For this post I want to talk about sincerity and irony is regards to a Youtube persona, Miranda Sings. Here are some video by her. I have also included the links to each video, as the youtube comments are essential to the development of this persona.
It is interesting to see how the character has developed over time. Here is one of Miranda Sing’s first videos:
I think this last video reveals a lot about the character. Miranda Sings is a fictive persona made up by actress/comedian Colleen Balligner. Ballinger drew her inspiration for the character from other students in her college acting in singing class. This evolution is best described in an article by the Sunday Times titled “Miranda: teaching the world to sing”:
“Appropriately, the character was born on Christmas Eve 2007, when Ballinger was on a break from what she terms her “private Christian university”. ‘There were a lot of cocky girls who thought they were really talented, and they weren’t. They were so rude and snotty, it drove me nuts. Then I saw all these girls trying to make a career out of putting videos on YouTube for thousands to watch, clueless to the fact that they were terrible. The characters were so ridiculous, I wanted to make one of my own. Miranda was created out of spite.’
Ballinger made several videos as Mirandasings08 — her parents were shocked that she was ‘butchering’ her voice — which attracted a few hundred viewers. Last year, she still doesn’t know why or how, things suddenly went crazy. Her parody of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies has received more than 700,000 hits, while both her infamous Voice Lesson and Poker Face postings have attracted more than 400,000.
‘Viewers thought Miranda was real,’ she says. ‘I got a lot of hate mail from people, saying ‘You are stupid, you can’t sing’, and I was eating it up. Some people are still coming up at the end of my shows, telling me, ‘You are such an inspiration. I really love your work — keep trying to make it.’”
Now she has over 40,000 subscribers and almost 12 million views. At least some of those subscribers are likely to believe that Miranda is sincere. And what about the others? Do they like her because she is ironic or do they want to believe that Miranda is sincere? Where does her appeal lie? I am also interested to know if Ballinger’s ideas about sincerity and what constitutes good singing have changed through this whole experience. She now tours around the world as this character performing a cabaret show.
