RuPaul's Drag Race and the Art of Parody

this video is brought to you by - Lane visit - link com / serozha to get a free 30-day trial of - Lane premium if you like it you can use my coupon code Sara's at a checkout for a 10% off discount we all have our problematic faves celebrity is movies bands or TV shows that are trashy a little bit troublesome or are just otherwise bad in some way but that we recognize for what they are and enjoy nonetheless some of my friends have as a Lea Banks music Harry Potter fan fiction or make up youtubers who keep continually getting into some kind of drama as for my problematic fave provided we only get one it would probably have to be RuPaul's Drag Race both the show and RuPaul himself have been embroiled in a number of controversies over the years RuPaul comparing trans women on HRT competing on the show to Olympic athletes taking steroids despite the fact that numerous sis contestants who make their entire brand how much plastic surgery they have have been welcomed on and even won certain seasons the judges on the show giving tone-deaf advice to contestants with immigrant backgrounds such as implying their inauthentic for not being out to their families or criticisms that the show edit certain contestants and unfairly negative ways and doesn't prepare them appropriately for the onslaught of hate they receive as a result there are all very valid criticisms and problems I'm well aware of I'm certainly not going to argue against all the ways in which the show and the people behind the show have created harmful content but we've all got our trash and well this is my trash part of why I like the show is the talent of the various competitors it's just cool as hell to see someone make a beautiful gown out of literal garbage or somehow make the cringy writing unscripted acting challenges genuinely funny or perfectly impersonate a celebrity I've never even heard of in a way that makes me die laughing anyway I for instance I mean massive Stan of season 5 winner and non-binary icon jinkx monsoon to the extent that she's been my twitter by Overlake years and i even got a tattoo to represent her catchphrase I also just really like drag and watching the show has encouraged me to get more involved in the local scene and find some really cool Canadian performers but as much as I do just enjoy the show on a somewhat trashing surface one of the things that's particularly interesting to me about drag race is the way it's able to play the reality TV game perfectly the show at least in its first season started off as an almost self-aware CariDee of reality TV shows like America's Next Top Model frequently referencing and borrowing reality TV tropes and making jokes about similarities to Tyra Banks and Project Runway much like drag culture itself often blends are ever in parody with artistic expression the show both worked as a serious competition between drag artists and a parody of hyper capitalistic reality TV without taking itself too seriously in the process but what's interesting to me is that it's almost like in deconstructing and learning what elements make an iconic reality TV show tick drag race has almost become like this hyper exaggerated exemplification of everything a reality TV show is and it's been incredibly successful for it the show's been nominated for freaking twenty three Emmys a GLAAD Media Award five Critics Choice Awards and a number of other accolades it's also got a million spin-offs like drag race all-stars drag race cage drag race Thailand and the upcoming Drag Race Canada and celebrit rag race the show is that effect a cultural juggernaut of drag and it's mainstream success has also seen the introduction of many of its alumni into other aspects of pop culture former contestants have featured in popular movies like dumpling started Super Bowl ads acted in music videos by artists like Taylor Swift and have even started their own successful makeup lines drags mainstream success has been met with mixed feelings from the community itself on one hand it's a massive opportunity for people who have been able to find success through this process and may lead to increased acceptance for people participating in it on the other hand drag race is a really small limited view of what drag is that's not inherently a bad thing and it doesn't have to represent every type of drag Under the Sun but that success isn't being found by for example Kings or people interested in more horror oriented art the show's gotten better about this but it also historically hasn't been super inclusive of openly trans performers as a result people who don't fit into the very small box of people who the show has propelled Vince's success may not be able to reap the benefits of drags mainstreaming and might find themselves excluded in favor of more profitable performers if you have people who watch the show but don't know that much else about the community coming in to drag bars and only tipping the big names and excluding everyone else some people might not really feel like they're benefiting there's also the worry that making it palatable to a larger mainstream audience could force it to be overly sanitized and that's a criticism of the show as well some people are worried it's become a lot more family-friendly as of late which might force people to compromise their art and limit the power of something that's been used as a form of protest in the past regardless I think it'd be difficult to deny the fact that drag or at least drag races version of drag has absolutely gone mainstream as a result of the show's success what interests me given the fact that it started out as a very low-budget semi parody with little to no production value is how we got here in the first place what made it a good parody and how did the shift to high budget high concept reality TV happen and what drives that success these days like the show or hate the show I think there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here when it comes to how it found its success and given that the show's freaking 12th season is about to start likely to skyrocketing ratings and massive popularity it feels like a good time to take a look back at the program's popularity so let me take off my jinkx monsoon Stan hat for a second and let's talk about drag race the epitome of reality TV dry-erase doesn't always take itself completely seriously there are lots of self referential jokes abject silliness and parodies of other content but at the same time success on the show is genuinely a huge deal these days winning the show means you get a hundred thousand dollars at a ton of opportunities but being declared the winner isn't always the best way to actually win at it the real prizes are the opportunities afforded to you if you're able to make a career out of your exposure on the show so actual placement isn't quite as important as how much screen time you get and how favorably you present yourself look at finalists like Brooklyn Heights from last season she didn't win but because of her performance and romance with a fellow contestant she got a lot of screen time and became extremely popular and is now going to be a permanent host on Drag Race Canada many of the most popular contestants such as catches analogic of adore delano or shangela never won anything and managed to gain their popularity based largely on how they were able to make themselves appear on TV reality TV is in a lot of ways a pretty uncontrollable process you have no idea in what order the things you say will be edited and even people who were pretty nice can be edited to look extremely unlikable with a variety of tactics one of the most egregious examples of this on drag race is what they did to contestant max on season 7 after she took a break on the stage when her corset was hurting the producers asked her to sing a song to let them know that she was doing okay they then edited the producers asking about it out making it seem like she had a mental breakdown on the stage and started singing for no reason she ended up getting eliminated that night and was made to look negatively in a way that could potentially harm her career you can't plan for that they often even stitch together clips from different days all together to create sort of Franken sentences where Queens supposedly talk about things they never actually mentioned in real life just look at this clip here where shangela clothing literally changes mid-sentence I love my girls I see but I don't feel that she's completely confident in what she's saying so I'm wondering is she gonna be able to pull this off nowadays they make them all wear the same clothing for their confessional so you can't tell they're doing it but you can easily look back to a lot of mid episode costume changes in earlier seasons to see how the show crafts certain narratives now this isn't unique to drag race and while I think this is a bit ethically dubious given that it's people's careers that are being played with here it's certainly not a unique criticism of this particular show so much is just an observation of reality television in general everybody knows that reality TV isn't actually real and this certainly isn't going to be a revelation to most people but even though everyone watching it probably knows on some level that a large amount of it is editing people do still get taken in by reality TV narratives and when it comes to a show that depicts people engaging in their actual careers the ramifications of that can be severe for example Fifi O'Hara was depicted as the villain on the show's fourth season she certainly did not act her best during the show but there was still a lot of editing choices inherent in what narrative was chosen to be depicted and why during such a stressful competitive time with hundreds of hours of footage per person everyone's gonna have sweet moments and out-of-control moments which were certainly selectively chosen for Fifi to highlight some of her worst traits when she returned for an all-star season she had this really interesting conversation about how she kept hitting hate on social media for how she appeared on the show and even had trouble getting work clubs wouldn't book her because they perceived her as someone who would be unprofessional difficult to work with or with a bad reputation pretty much everyone i knows met her in person has said she's extremely sweet but she still had trouble getting work because of the perception that her behavior in real life is the same that it would be on reality TV the same thing happened for the editing on all-stars and she's spoken about how she was asked by producers to say negative things about certain contestants which was then aired as if she started complaining about them for no reason I follow her on social media and people still tweet hate directly at her on the regular and season four aired nine years ago the potential consequences of the unpredictable editing process are serious and often long-lasting but of course the reverse is true as well people who are able to control that process or at least come out of it relatively unscathed are more likely to succeed so for example contestants like shangela are extremely good at playing the reality TV game she's very good at finding moments that can be exploited for drama whether it's noticing that an outfit a contestant said she made out of hair was actually made out of tulle fabric and managing to spin the entire narrative of that episode to be about her figuring it out or giving a whole monologue that convinces one contestant and the audience that she's about to be eliminated before turning it on someone else entirely I love her shangela was robbed contestants like her who understand the tropes and beats of what makes reality TV interesting are often able to manipulate the workings of the show to both create favorable television and make themselves appear particularly important for the show's narrative shangela is now one of the most popular contestants to have been on the show at least if you go by Instagram followers and has managed to use her TV success to her advantage having acted in a number of movies like a star is born and being a commentator for Eurovision she's done better than a lot of contestants who have won the entire thing despite having lost all three of her seasons we also see that contestants who are extremely talented but don't have as loud or infectious personalities don't tend to last particularly long one egregious example of this is Season eleven contestant sugar cane who was performing extremely well and did great in a number of challenges but didn't get into a ton of drama and didn't have a very clear narrative assigned to her by the editors story wise she clearly wasn't supposed to be in the top anymore and the producers essentially decided that her time had come despite the fact that she was performing relatively well despite being widely accepted as the third best performer in the magic show she was assigned to compete in she was placed in the bottom for essentially no reason over people who did genuinely terribly and was eliminated rather unceremoniously success on the show particularly in the most recent seasons is therefore a lot less about being the best drag queen not that it ever really was and is a lot more about being the best reality TV contestant to me this really just makes it a fantastic case study for what reality TV is it's not that being good at drag doesn't matter contestants who are funny or likable but a really fucked-up challenges can still get eliminated and more quiet people can still make it fairly far and even sometimes win but realistically if being a good reality TV contestant is just nowadays as much of an aim of the show's competitors as being a good drag queen is which is why it's extremely interesting to watch a competition where what people are trying their hardest to do is win reality TV and it's so interesting to see what people actually do to attempt to achieve this a lot of people on the show try as hard as possible to produce themselves using clear brandable catchphrases as much as possible and heavily emphasizing one or two marketable traits about themselves after contestant van G had an iconic spur-of-the-moment exit that became an instant meme she was actually allowed to return for the show's next season despite being eliminated first and became an immediate fan favorite advancing [Music] [Applause] given the fact that these moments can mean such massive career success you have a large number of people on the show essentially trying to catch lightning in a bottle and engaging in extreme self commodification sometimes this can be successful my message for the human race is really quite simple [Music] hiyee hiyee hiyee hiyee and sometimes particularly if it's perceived as trying too hard or inauthentic it can be less so I just want to say if everybody remembered this excuse me everybody's attention attitude chat so yes yeah go do me like that it's a very interesting dynamic one where virtually everyone is trying as hard as possible to make themselves into a meme but if it's too apparent that someone is trying to make themselves into a meme it's received really harshly the same thing happened after season 9 competitor Sasha velour did an amazing reveal in the finale with rose petals in her wig and won the crown despite not being the front-runner at that time next year at the finale literally every contestant had a whole bunch of stuff hidden under their costumes including actual functioning fireworks and live butterflies it got so ridiculous that it got parodied at next year's finale and contestants were criticized for trying too hard and relying on reveals as a crutch and it definitely got goofy but honestly when contestants can be so successful by studying the exact formulas of what works for virality it's hard to blame people for trying it's worked for so many others and the rewards of creating a stunning TV moment and potentially winning the series are massive so as much as it's easy to roll one's eyes at forced catchphrases and excessive reveals they're incentivized by the structure of the show itself it was brew he'll blame her not for me on the pole this means that the way the show works and is edited is genuinely important for a lot of people despite its sometimes tongue-in-cheek nature in effect the show has to take itself seriously to a much larger degree than it used to and it's definitely been elevated beyond simple parody as a result of its success and evolving content form so even though I don't love the fact that it's manipulated so heavily it does make it a pretty strong exemplification of what reality television is and I think largely speaking that comes from how the show started out the show's beginnings were extremely home it's first season was filmed with an extremely low budget filmed in the basement of the studio in Burbank and needing to use an actual broom closet as a control room even after the rest of the show became popular season 1 was extremely hard to get a hold of which is why it's still referred to by many fans as the lost season part of why that is is because they didn't actually have the proper license to use a lot of the music they used on that season and couldn't properly air it until that license was renewed the show was absolutely a celebration of drag and there were a lot of genuinely heartfelt moments in that first season but there was also definitely a larger element to parity as the stakes for a lot lower much like a lot of drag itself it blended tongue-in-cheek references to shows like Project Runway even using a former contestant as a judge and genuine competition and it could afford to do that because given the limited scope and consequence of the show the actual outcomes of the competition were a lot less real for the queens competing so I think in a way it's shift from a parody of hyper capitalistic reality competition shows to just being a hyper capitalistic reality competition show simply came from its ability to find success after its first season but I also think it's tongue-in-cheek status at the beginning of the show kind of uniquely equipped it for reality TV success so let's talk about that I always feel like there's something interesting there when something that starts out as an abject parody of something ends up just becoming an example of that thing played completely straight one of my favorite examples of this is the webseries actually by CollegeHumor bless up soul um actually started out as a scripted comedy video five years ago starring Mike Trapp and the bit was that he was an insufferable nerd grilling other insufferable nerds about nerd and they'd have to respond with the correction actually this to be clear wasn't an actual competition show and the people in the video worked fully playing themselves it was just a fictional mostly scripted parody written by trap making fun of people who feel the need to compulsively correct others about minor details of nerd the punchline comes where after many minutes of correcting each other about trivial details like where the bands and star wars first played Mike Trapp asks them a real life skills question and none of them are able to answer it they know the ship and Firefly is named serenity not Firefly but none of them know how to jumpstart a car or what an IRA is there's a bit of authenticity there but ultimately I'm actually is a mostly scripted parody series that mocks pedantic nerds well eventually someone at CollegeHumor realized that one there are a lot of potential in their audience and two there are a lot of pedantic nerds working at the company which I can't be too harsh on I am also kind of a pedantic nerd so about a year and a half ago they launched on actually as a real competition series they even bring on celebrity guests like Matt Mercer or Rachel bloom and the thing is even pretty high budget for college humor it can still be a little self-deprecating at times but for the most part the show plays it straight it's not really making fun of nerds for correcting minor details about fictional works the aim of the game is genuinely just to be a nerd correcting minor details about fictional works um actually has in many ways become the thing it hates it's just completely on ironic they even air segments from fans correct him in one detail they get wrong by the show I say all this like my aim is to be snarky about the fact that I'm actually started as a parody of um actually nerds and now it's a show for I'm actually nerds in actuality I don't think this is nice barely a terrible thing I mean I like meeting one of those people just as much as anyone else and I do think being overly pedantic about stuff that doesn't really matter it's just a bad social skill in most situations but also I think a lot of us do have that part of our personalities that don't like when people call Remy the rat ratatouille or misquote Star Trek that's kind of a fun show to watch sometimes and feel smug when you know the answers and hey some people behind CollegeHumor recognized that there was money to be made from doing on actually as a real show and also probably realize that they were having fun filming it I don't blame them at all for taking something that started as a parody and just playing it straight I just think recognizing its origins makes it a very interesting story as to how it's so easy for things that start out as a mockery of common pop culture tropes to get actually good a feeling for something to be a good parody you have to recognize and play with the tropes that makes the original thing work in the first place if I want to make a parody of reality TV with some stunning drag queens I have to understand what made stuff like America's Next Top Model tick only when I really get it can I start to play with it or poke fun of it score it's the same reason all artists even ones who draw in hyper stylized cartoon styles are encouraged to properly learn real human anatomy first I mean to quote what is essentially the Bible of tropes and pop-culture tropes or tools they're basically just commonly recognized building blocks that we can use to tell a story and recognize other stories for what they are quickly in a lot of ways they can work as storytelling shorthand if music with a dark minor chord plays as we see a low angle shot of someone in a menacing mask walk towards us that probably means they're going to be a villain it doesn't have to mean that and you can definitely subvert that trope look at the scary guy from home alone but just like subverting a trope doesn't make something automatically clever or good using a trope doesn't automatically make something cliche or bad in the words of a tweet by Maya Franklin complaining a lot of work for having Trump's in it is complaining about a tree for being made of wood I mean I don't agree with their take on TV Tropes because I think the website is pretty clear that tropes are fun and every story uses them to communicate the narrative more clearly but there's definitely this widespread idea online that a story having tropes in it makes it add just look at words like trophy use derisively like what's next are we gonna drive buildings by calling them bricky oh that's a terrible dish it's so ingredient II anyway my point is for a parody of thing to be good you have to understand what makes thing work in the first place that's why surface level parodies of things that don't really get to the heart of why something is funny don't tend to do well like I remember back in 2010 I was so excited to watch Vampires Suck which was this vampire movie spoof because I had just looped around from liking Twilight to being too cool for it and my little cynical self was like yes tear it to shreds that I was watching it like whoever made this clearly didn't understand anything about why people like the Twilight movies in the first place it's just dumb jokes that have an aesthetic similarity to Twilight at best there's a lot of funny stuff in there too legitimately parody if you do the work and understand what makes it tick but this is just dumb on the other hand parodies of say reality TV shows that actually understand reality TV tropes and can make fun of them in engaging ways can be really funny one of my friends Emily who is an amazing writer started writing a fanfiction of the DD podcast me and my friends do as a joke it was really funny at first because it was sort of a parody of my immortal and popular fanfiction Tropes a lot of stuff happened in it that's common in fan fictions and in sitcoms like oh this person has a date with two people at once or oh there's a good version of this person an evil version we have to stop the evil version but it turns out those building blocks are popular for a reason and it's because you can do a lot of cool stuff with them and once a whole bunch of us started tuning in and we were like oh this is interesting Emily ended up taking those building blocks and turning it from a parody into a genuinely compelling story that used our podcast setting as its backdrop and now it's up to like 75,000 words and it's something a whole bunch of us tuned in every few days for and get really excited whenever another chapter drops and drop an hour for because she took something that started as a parody and used the building blocks that she's satirize to tell a genuinely good and compelling story and I think that is exactly why when you play with fiction in a way that's not about being snide and superior but is instead about celebrating it and seeing what you can do with the popular idea you can create something genuinely amazing I think that's why parody loving creative parody not snide surface-level mockery is such a uniquely equipped shanwa to create something good I think this is true even when something stays a parody people love Young Frankenstein not because it makes fun of horror movies and tries to tear them down but because it plays with what makes horror movies good in a funny and compelling way even though drag race takes itself a lot more seriously now and winning it is genuinely a big deal that people spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to do one thing I do love about it is the fact that it's just so completely shameless about its corporate sponsorships there's this moment where RuPaul is interviewing the season 9 finalists and they're talking so seriously about what being queer means to them and how they got into doing drag and what winning would mean to them and then RuPaul pulls out a squatty potty and he's like okay this is our sponsor ladies and everyone just has to smile awkwardly while pretending they're super elated about this gift and it's so stupid but it's genuinely such a hilarious and goofy moment and one of my favorite dumb things of the recent seasons and that's such a funny riff on the way a lot of those shows are sponsored to hell and back like some of y'all don't like me doing sponsorships you should see how many products they're peddling on Drag Race there's like five per episode and they're also completely shameless about it and yet despite the fact that they self referential II joke about it the show makes a ton of money RuPaul himself is a 16 millionaire and the show's budget is consistently growing more and more Matt by the minute whether or not one likes Roux and I've repeatedly said RuPaul is my least favorite part of RuPaul's Drag Race the way he walks the line of parodied reality TV and playing reality TV straight is absolute marketing genius and I think it's exactly this phenomenon that makes drag race such a massively successful show I mean I've certainly criticized the fact that it's so reality TV that it can be unfair to contestants who don't fit that mold but like it or not it has absolutely captured the very essence of what makes reality TV shows successful in a way it's essentially deconstructed and almost reverse engineered the perfect reality show which is why it's so architecturally ttv my favorite example of this is this moment where a bunch of contestants are shit-talking the Queens who have been eliminated while looking into the mirror and the two-way mirror lights up and they're all there having listened the entire time and like its iconic that season aired four years ago and it's still being talked about today is one of the show's most memorable moments I already mentioned earlier that producers engineered this moment by encouraging Fifi to trash-talk the girl she'd sent home it's not authentic no reality shows are but by God is a good TV on the whole I just think parody is a really interesting genre in general good parodies I think need to be made with love and not with snide derision of the source material it's easy to enjoy and engage in content that's largely just tearing other content apart especially when it validates our pre-existing opinions I mean I know in high school I used to bend out and watch honest trailers after finishing math homework because I was literally tired of using my brain in a positive and productive way that I want to make fun of divergent in the words of the critic from ratatouille which is a great movie that I own ironically love we thrive on negative criticism which is fun to write and to read but the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism meaning it so and I think this is true competition reality TV may be a bit of a guilty pleasure but it engages people for a reason watching people compete watching them get into manufactured drama seeing the stuff people create with limited resources it's genuinely enjoyable and the fact that it isn't actually reality is kind of the point when folks are looking for an escape from reality and I think despite its many many problems drag race is something that was made both out of a love for drag and a genuine love for the shows a trips off love and I think ultimately the fact that it was largely born of the art of parity is what makes it so incredibly successful it understands the tropes of reality TV so well that it's become sort of the ultimate reality TV show in the way it's produced and receives by its audience and although it's problematic this understanding and engineering of those tropes makes it both intensely successful and intensely captivating now if you need me I'll be watching Season 12 and hopelessly trying to figure out who to root for please tell me I don't know yet usually I know like help being a media critic and spending so much of my time online I basically hate anything that makes the process of accessing the Internet slower that's why I really enjoy dashlane which is essentially a computer and phone app that gives you a shortcut for the stuff you do online it lets you log in to pretty much any website with a single click and automatically fills out long forms for you which as a person who spends enough time typing already are you very thankful for there's also a built-in VPN that lets you access the content you want when you want it which as someone who loves TV I really appreciate it also works for you on pretty much every device across Mac Windows iPhone or Android it's ad free does not require a credit card to sign up and it actually never has access to your personal data I really loved it and I had good experiences with it if you want to try a month of - link premium you can check it out and have a much easier time online at - line.com slash there is Ed or just click the link in my description if you end up liking it you can also use the coupon codes there is Ed for 10% off at checkout I really like - Lane and it's made my online experience a lot more convenient so I hope it can do the same for some of y'all now let the music play [Music] you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sarah Z

Views: 245,566

Keywords: sarah z, video essay, drag race, rupaul, rupaul's drag race, rpdr, drag race season 12, phi phi o'hara, all stars 2, trixie mattel, katya zamolodchikova, trixya, trixie and katya, criticsm, jackie cox, gigi goode, dahlia sin, aiden zhane, video, michelle visage, yvie oddly, adore delano, shangela, bianca del rio, kim chi, katya, sasha velour, collegehumor, um actually, dimension 20, brennan mulligan, mike trapp, college humor, matt mercer, collegehumor um actually

Id: lpunjFjKK6w

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BasicWhiteTwink]

So Rupaul how does it feel to have a... Uh.. H I... Hit tv show. Hit tv show!

[u/into_dust]

Sarah Z <3

[u/_techniker]

thank you for this new YouTube channel to follow I love her. very good analysis

[u/[deleted]]

"This is my trash". Or as Jade once said: I'm happy with what I got from the dumpster.

God I live for her!

[u/kostis12345]

Thanks for sharing this video, I didn't know know her and her content is generally interesting, I subscribed. That said, she is so chill that he visual part of her video becomes a bit blunt, almost like listening to the radio, but if that's the way she enjoys recording, power to her.

[u/irgous]

Loca, I said HIV!