Jenna Marbles: The YouTube Star
See also:
*Jenna Marbles: Outtakes from our People Issue interview
*Our 2012 YouTube issue, with profiles of Elle and Blair Fowler, Freddie Wong, Issa Rae, Nathan Barnatt and more.
One Friday in July 2010, Jenna Mourey drove home from her job at a tanning salon in Boston; she had to shower and change for her night gig as a go-go dancer. As she walked into her apartment, she decided to film herself getting ready.
She enjoyed go-go dancing (getting paid to dance -- in flats!). But she had a master's degree from Boston University in sports psychology and counseling. Her life was, as she says, "ridiculous."
"I went to school, tried really hard, did everything I was supposed to do, and now, like, what the fuck is this mess I'm in right now?" the 25-year-old recalls thinking. "I'm going to work dancing in my underwear, making myself look like a whore on purpose."
That night she edited together a video called "How to Trick People Into Thinking You're Good-Looking" and posted it on YouTube. By the time she got to her night gig, the other dancers had already passed it around Facebook. It has since been watched 38 million times.
Jenna Marbles, as she now calls herself, eventually started posting weekly to her YouTube channel, which has 2.9 million subscribers (No. 6 on the site), and almost half a billion views. Most of her fans are teenage girls, who relate to her foul-mouthed, brutally straightforward comedy sketches on the plight of young womanhood.
Her video "How to Avoid Talking to People You Don't Want to Talk To," for example, was inspired by a guy who was pestering her in a Rhode Island nightclub. She gave him a bizarre look -- picture a scared clown -- and didn't say a thing. The technique spread among her female fans, to the point where the creepy guys now know what it is and give it back. Articles about "the face" painted her as some kind of YouTube feminist but, like most entertainers, her process is instinctual. "I fucking hate that," she says. "They're giving me way too much credit."
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