The Fred Phenomenon

Anyone who has ever used YouTube knows who Fred Figglehorn is. He's a 6-year-old character created by a kind of obnoxious 15-year-old from Nebraska named Lucas.

The teenager's tools? The popular internet site, a personalized t-shirt, a hand-held video camera, and video-editing software that is able to heighten the pitch of his voice. Extensively.

About a week ago, Fred broke the million subscriber mark and for the past few months has been gaining subscribers at a rate of about 10 000 a day.

The epic question is, of course... why the hell is this guy so popular? Honestly, it has been proven by multiple spoof-makers that what he does is not particularly unique and it doesn't require much creativity.

The formula for a Fred video? Hold a camera above your face and run around a lot. Incorporate random screams. Refer to really bizarre sounding people in your character's life who have the same deep voice, without discerning between gender or age. Talk about things no six-year-old should know about.

The YouTube community is loaded to the brim with fresh talent. People who actually put days of effort into their videos. There are YouTube users whose videos could go on forever and you'd still be watching. Face it, after 2 or 3 Fred videos, it gets a little redundant and tedious. How, then, is it fair that Fred has over a million subscribers and most of the most talented have at most 100 000?

To Lucas's credit, he is a quite good actor. Regardless of his personal channel and appearances where he has used his real voice, there are still tons of people who believe that there is a disturbed six-year-old out there running around with his druggie mum's camera.

However. The fact is that Lucas's newfound fame is not really deserved. Running around filming yourself screaming and then raising the pitch does not exactly indicate creativity or talent.

His standard of comedy should be below the lowest, but instead is raised up high. What is our society coming to?