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Even if the video clips are somewhat disquieting, they're irresistibly funny. A guy in a yellow T-shirt cries loudly over a newspaper, his plaintive sobs stifled only when he fills his mouth with whipped cream from an aerosol can. A woman seated at a kitchen table throws her head back and wails like a wounded animal, then pops a Tater Tot into her mouth. A lanky fellow, his face contorted in pain, sobs as half-chewed potato chips fall from his mouth.
These ridiculous vignettes, along with 38 others, appear on Crying While Eating (cryingwhileeating.com), a website that has prompted 15 million hits since late May to become one of the Internet's most popular. It spent about two weeks as No. 1 on Google for a search of the word "crying," according to the site's creators.
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The site's success, no doubt, lies in its absurdity. The episodes, all faked, are each labeled with an incident that supposedly inspired the emotion. "Afshin" weeps over his chocolate-covered éclair because there are "not enough positive news stories." "Demian" groans with a mouthful of mustard sandwich because he "feels like a fraud." "Nate" and "Sean" cry over coriander lobster bisque and beer because "they haven't lived up to each other's expectations." "Aaron," the man with the mouthful of potato chips, sobs because "his girlfriend is making him go to therapy."
Yet the site's appeal is rooted in something deeper than the absurd; the effect of the clips is actually visceral. The scenes evoke the kind of unself-conscious, shame-free expressions of psychic pain that few have indulged since childhood. They capture people at their most vulnerable, taking childlike refuge in another primal experience: eating. Yet the food fails to comfort, creating a wacky incongruity. Put simply, it's at once funny and disturbing to watch someone sob uncontrollably, break for a mouthful of éclair and resume sobbing.
"It's a very private thing," says site co-creator Casimir Nozkowski, a Brooklyn-based writer-producer with the AMC cable network. "Sobbing. Sobbing. Letting it all out. And then, 'Oh, this beer is really tasty!' "
Despite the site's homegrown appeal, its design and concept were actually quite strategically thought out. Nozkowski, 28, and his high school chum Dan Engber, 29, a freelance writer with the online magazine Slate, created the site to compete in a contest sponsored by the New York-based Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. The goal of the Contagious Media Showdown was to create the Internet's most infectious website.
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-fo-media15jun15.story
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