The first time Louisa Melcher appeared in my TikTok feed, I disliked her immediately. This is her gift.
Chattering giddily, with the bulging eyes of an exhibitionist savoring the spotlight, she announced that she wanted to “set the record straight” about why she had rejected a marriage proposal during a Taylor Swift concert. A clip of Swift spotting a proposal in a crowd last summer on the Eras Tour had been circulating. Melcher, gesticulating emphatically, clarified that she loved her boyfriend but was particular about proposals. “I know people are going to hate me for this,” she said, “but I don’t really like Taylor Swift. Like I didn’t even have the song he proposed to me saved in my Spotify.”
It’s a testament to her acting (and my gullibility) that I believed this fictional character was real. But I was far from the only one. The comments section was full of bile. Critics posted videos about her. Elle magazine published an article online about the rejection.
Remarkably, Melcher, 26, pulls off this kind of comedic con with regularity, going viral with strategically irritating characters on the margins of news stories. In a parody of a first-person essay in The Cut, she played the Department of Justice video editor who neglected to clear the metadata in the video of Jeffrey Epstein’s final hours but is not sorry, she says, because of a commitment to radical self-forgiveness. When the new pope was announced, she portrayed a character discovering in the middle of a video call that her mother had once been in a situationship with him as a teenager. It got 85 million views across platforms.
Unknown to the mainstream but notorious among the terminally online, Melcher is a new kind of comedy star: the master troll. Her feeds, filled with finely observed character sketches intended to provoke and amuse, add up to a body of work that represents some of the best cringe comedy in years.
Likability was once the essential quality in comedy, but in a digital age that rewards outrage and divisiveness, being hateable might be just as valuable. Trolling has become a defining sensibility of the culture, and comedy artists as diverse as Louisa Melcher, Nathan Fielder and Lionel McGloin owe a debt to its growing reach.
It’s no secret that the algorithms that govern our social media incentivize rancor, and what goes really viral are posts that make people fight with each other. The most powerful people in the country understand how to troll. See California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s feed on X. Elon Musk, the owner of that platform, which can seem like a trolling clubhouse, once proudly asked his followers if he was the best troll in the world.
The $1.25 billion deal that Paramount made for “South Park,” a cartoon that tries to offend everyone, is itself an argument for the triumph of trolling. Colin Quinn pioneered trolling on Twitter and his fellow stand-up Ari Shaffir used that platform to rile people up by making offensive jokes about national tragedies.
The cultural footprint of trolling has expanded so widely over the past decade that it’s shifted the meaning of the term and even spawned a new class of young digital native comedians with elevated ambitions: They’re finding new ways to make work using alienation and obnoxiousness.
MELCHER BELONGS TO a boutique tradition of media-savvy pranksters that dates at least to Alan Abel, a bohemian spirit who in the middle of the last century founded a fake protest movement against unclothed animals called the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. It was catnip to local newscasters. His brilliantly executed hoaxes include faking his own death to get an obituary (and correction) in The New York Times. Andy Kaufman and Sacha Baron Cohen followed in his footsteps, to more fame, fortune and critical praise. They each sought out audiences (in wrestling arenas, rodeos and halls of power) to anger people, then got laughs from their reactions.
But it’s really the internet that ushered in the golden age of trolling, because context collapse is built into the process of going viral, and reposts and comment sections make integrating responses into the thing itself easier than ever. The feedback Melcher receives operates as a punchline: an incongruous mix of consternation and smiling emojis that clearly delineates who is on the inside and the outside of the joke.
The difference between trolling and satire has always been slippery, but traditionally the satirist has a more legible point to make, while the troll delights in confusion and chaos. It’s why satire has always been more respectable and righteous. As trolling becomes pervasive online, that is starting to change.
OFFENDED READERS ARE a key element of how a new musical was trolled onto the stage. Andrew Fox, a 38-year-old theater composer, created a stir on social media this year by posting often about a show whose premise read like an elaborate troll: a hip-hop take on Anne Frank called “Slam Frank” — with the twist that Anne was reimagined as “a real marginalized” person, a pansexual Latina named Anita Franco.
The response alternated between baffled and apoplectic. When someone protested that Anne Frank was an actual white Jewish girl, Fox told them to stop gatekeeping. “I finally created an opportunity for Latinx girlies to feel seen, to feel included, to feel like they’re a part of the Holocaust — and you’re just trying to take them away from that,” he insisted, deadpan.
Others complained that the Holocaust shouldn’t be glibly turned into a Broadway musical. In a post, Fox agreed, and then added that Off Broadway was more suitable.
These jokes were passed around in the text threads of Broadway denizens. Fox’s follower count rose, which he boasted about, trash-talking other shows with a lesser social media presence. A petition was created to cancel “Slam Frank,” and Fox delighted in the free publicity for a show that didn’t seem to exist outside social media.
Whereas Melcher invents fake characters to troll audiences, what became clear from Fox’s sneak previews of catchy, tuneful songs is that he wrote a real musical that only seemed like a fake troll.
He took outlandish positions to mock the absurdities of performative progressive politics in American theater and specifically the double standards applied to Jews. Echoing ideas in books by Dara Horn (“People Love Dead Jews”) and David Baddiel (“Jews Don’t Count”), his jokes made the point that concerns about representation and appropriation don’t typically apply to Jewish artists.
And yet, the musical doesn’t fit tidily into a partisan ideological box. I attended a workshop in June (the show is returning for a run at the Asylum Theater in September) and Fox, who was inspired to write the show after seeing a Twitter thread debating Anne Frank’s “white privilege,” introduced the event noting wryly that since tickets were free, he wouldn’t offer a land acknowledgment. A full-frontal assault on cringe political theater, “Slam Frank” portrays Anne as concerned less about the Nazis than about her own journey of self-actualization. Witness the mock-earnest line: “Every woman is a Jew hiding in her own attic.”
The tone here is an insider one, employing a clever pastiche of musical styles that indicates talent and a deep immersion in theatrical craft. (The sound and vibe of “Hamilton” is vigorously parodied.) It’s harder for a musical to troll than a social media post to do so. And while a video of Fox online can land in the “for you” pages of a wide range of people, attending a musical is more self-selecting. You are already in on the joke. Fox seems to understand this as a challenge, and without giving away spoilers, his show makes a late-act pivot, digging into the politics of Israel, that seems intended to alienate some of its target audience.
This musical’s politics, which online commentators have debated, seem less committed to a particular side than to the ideology of the online troll.
TROLLING EASILY BLEEDS into edgelord nihilism and has become associated with the online right. But the left trolls, too. John Oliver does it regularly on his HBO show. And on social media, you can find progressives trolling the alt right by posting images of men kissing with the hashtag #proudboys.
One of the more adventurous young comedy trolls on YouTube is Lionel McGloin. His show, “No Cap on God,” displays the influence of Sacha Baron Cohen, rattling people at an anti-Zohran Mamdani political rally and at fashion week events. But his irreverent man-on-the-street comedy aims for a neutral perspective. He plays a buffoonish interviewer at Democratic and Republican conventions, asking activists serious questions, then baiting them with trivial ones. (“What’s your sign?” “Does size matter?”). Trolling is a natural antagonist to sincerity, but that doesn’t mean young artists can’t have an earnest commitment to it.
On April Fools’ Day, Melcher dryly told her Instagram followers that in an effort to commit to radical honesty, she would answer questions sincerely. Asked about her goals, she mentioned working in multiple forms but always focused on “her true passions: Trolling and performance art.”
The fact that she cited trolling as a passion represents a generational shift. Sacha Baron Cohen would probably not do that. Her pairing of trolling with performance art, a term that evokes highbrow experimentation, also reveals a shift. To a younger generation of digital natives, trolling does not merely involve bullying memes. It’s an art.
Satire has a longer and more storied history, but trolling today is flexible, and use of the term now co-opts territory once defined as parody. Look at the way the comedian Nathan Fielder is discussed. Almost anything he does is described online as a troll, including his telling Wolf Blitzer that he preferred CNN to podcasters. If Jonathan Swift, the venerable 18th-century literary satirist, was published today, he would surely be called a troll.
Melcher not only embraces the term but wants to push its limits, too. This year, her work has become more ambitious, meticulous and creative, integrating intricate, taut narratives and wider emotional palettes.
Just as horror movies reveal the anxieties of the culture, Melcher serves as a radar detector for what triggers us. Her trolling involves topical, observational humor — comments on the latest slang or therapy-speak or corporate trend. But take her output as a whole and a broader outlook comes into focus. Between the panic in her eyes and the frantic energy of so many of her characters, she captures an anxiety in the culture that is funny not because it’s obnoxious or frivolous, but because it’s utterly familiar.
Her manic, look-at-me monologists provide a snapshot of our fame-addled era. They seem less absurd the more time you spend online. Melcher’s characters are often fools who are less vain than clueless, the victim of horrible circumstances.
One recent video about an understandably panicked women trapped in a self-driving car came across as a clever dystopian “Black Mirror” episode: On her way to work, she wins a promotion giving her a free ride that forces her to go seven hours away to Disneyland. It’s an absurd scenario, but she makes it seem eerily plausible.
Once again, the comments were full of rattled people, fooled again, offering legal advice (“Sue!”) or telling her to jump out of the car. One wrote: “Please be satire. Please be satire.”
This video feels like an evolution, a provocation intended to make you mad not at her, but at the system she’s stuck in, the technology we’re surrounded by. As usual, she’s playing a character describing something absolutely ridiculous but just plausible enough to believe. But this time, she engenders sympathy, not contempt. The final image is a photo of Melcher stern-faced in Disneyland, forced to go to the happiest place on Earth. It offers a funny kind of catharsis. Maybe Melcher has stumbled upon something new: a trolling tragic hero.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
The post The Comedian as Master Troll appeared first on New York Times.
