Every time I watch a 1+ hour video essay on YouTube I am reminded of why I don't watch 1+ hour video essays on YouTube. Even when they're good or entertaining, so far I haven't watched one that elucidated the actual point it was making in such a way that it deserved the run time.
I watched this video and I think it was well put together, had some interesting points, was moderately entertaining, and was about an an hour and fifteen minutes too long.
It basically boils down to "Conservative humor often isn't funny because it's not interested in jokes, it's interested in using the structure of jokes to make its nonsense beliefs believable to their audience while maintaining plausible deniability." Okay, cool, great! Why was that thesis buried an hour and a half into the video??
I think it really knocked the point home with the clips of Roseanne's special and how it's different from other conservative humor (she's actually attempting to tell jokes, she doesn't seem to care about being palatable) but did it need that much leadup? Where is your editor? What's going on here?
I assume that there's something about the YT algorithm that rewards very talented people for not providing their thesis statements up front and for making bloated videos. It really sucks though.
(The HBomberGuy video about tommy tallarico is IMO the exception that proves the rule because that one really is a rollercoaster that's difficult to unpack in less than its runtime. I still would have edited a bunch of that out though)
and to be clear this is not a dig on people who do watch long video essays. I'm sure they have value!! Like, on the one hand I'm simply disinterested in policing other people's viewing habits of any kind. But I also think there's more of a Me element to this.
I think the key reason they don't work for me is that I tend to give them 80-90% of my attention. I simply cannot have a video essay on in the background while I do anything meaingful, so I generally focus on the video, or at least I'm only doing dishes or whatever.
I'm a long-standing defender of incredibly long podcasts (see: all of my work in podcasts) but there are two differences that make them palatable to me:
- The podcasts I listen to are generally not scripted, so they have much more of a hangout vibe. The purpose is different.
- They are audio only, which means I don't have to pay quite as much attention while still getting the meat of the format.
When you're doing something that's scripted and demands much more attention (of me specifically), I have higher standards for how much information is packed into a given minute. And when I get to the end and go "This meeting could have been an email", I get grumpy.
