Madison Humphrey needed a McDonald’s. Not a cheeseburger with fries, but the entire restaurant.
Humphrey, a content creator, is known for her elaborate video parodies of unusual weddings. A water park ceremony complete with Jet Skis? No sweat. A wedding on a plane? Southwest Airlines helped her out with that one.
So when Humphrey began getting tagged in the comments of a wedding video at a McDonald’s in Akron, Ohio, she took advantage of her network and found herself filming at a Dallas location of the fast-food chain just days later.
“How many of us have gotten married in a McDonald’s?” she said in an interview.
If it sounds meanspirited, don’t worry — with all of her parodies, Humphrey gets the blessing of the original poster. It’s part of what differentiates her videos, a rare moment of politeness in an often harsh internet world.
Humphrey, who is 27 and lives in Dallas, studied broadcast journalism and got her start reporting on the sidelines of college football games. But it was her skit-style videos that brought her fame online.
In 2021, her TikTok caricatures of an unhelpful apartment leasing manager were a hit. Soon after, she started doing skits skewering general wedding traditions, like an overly aggressively cake smash, recruiting her husband, Brayden, as her perpetual groom.
“From that, people started tagging me in things that actually happened and saying, ‘This reminded me of your skit — it would be hilarious if you did an edition of this,’” Humphrey said.
With those early parodies, Humphrey said she got feedback from some of her subjects, who told her they would “have liked to have been asked or maybe been involved.” It was, she said, a “learning moment.”
She began to do that for each of her videos, even when it delayed the production, and even as her TikTok mentions multiplied. “My motto is always like, I want to laugh with people, not at people,” Humphrey said. (The same cannot always be said of those in Humphrey’s comments.)
“Sometimes people online will message me or get frustrated and ask what’s taking so long,” she said, adding, “A lot of times, I’m just waiting to get approval.”
The couple who got married at McDonald’s “both gave her our blessing,” Jamie Callicoat, 42, said.
She and her husband, George Callicoat, 48, who live in Copley, Ohio, both work at the McDonald’s that served as their venue.
“It was actually something our bosses brought up one day during a walk-through,” Jamie Callicoat said, adding that the couple didn’t mind if people “wanted to poke fun in good humor.”
This video would take some logistics: With the couple’s green light, Humphrey set about securing a McDonald’s, asking on social media if anybody in the Dallas area knew a general manager who might be open to it. She also gave a heads up to the friends and family she typically enlists for videos.
Her Instagram story ended up making the rounds among McDonald’s franchise owners in Texas, and she connected with a general manager.
“Then I had to get on a phone call with the public relations department of McDonald’s, because they just wanted to approve everything,” Humphrey said, adding, “There are a lot of steps that go into these, and, like, some legal steps.”
For most of her videos, she wears many hats: casting director, costumer and set decorator. She assigns roles to friends and family members and tasks someone, often one of her in-laws, with operating the camera.
Though she has an impressive collection of costumes and props, “I’m always ordering some sort of crazy prop that I need last minute,” she said. There’s a closet in her house devoted to storing the tools of her trade, including six wedding dresses, wigs and a special selection of gender reveal items, including T-shirts, balloons and confetti poppers. Fans might be surprised to know that, despite her willingness to be out and about in a wedding gown or silly wig, Humphrey describes herself as “very introverted.”
When filming, she likes to include the staff members at each venue if possible. “With the plane, we had actual flight attendants on board, and then at the water park, we had lifeguards,” she said. At McDonald’s, it was “a whole restaurant effort,” she added.
The entire thing came together in a matter of two days. In the attention economy, that speed is key, Humphrey said.
“It’s funny to see me try and do it as fast as I can: throw everything together, get a location, get the people, get the costumes,” she explained. “But also it’s become, like, a really big pressure.” She spaces out her parody videos between other skits — the type of content Humphrey said she prefers making — to give herself some time to “reset.”
And as for those who criticize her content for having a mocking tone, Humphrey sees it differently.
“I think people are like, ‘Oh, she only recreates cringey content,’” Humphrey said. “But I tell them: No, I recreate really cool, unique experiences.”
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