Scattered thoughts on Youtube poops

16 Apr, 2026

As of today, I've released two YTPs¹: Bob Dylan goes electric and Huge Henry's love-hate language. I love the form, and I had some thoughts on its fundamental mysteries and problems, what makes it tick, and what makes it so slippery.

For me, YTP is the form that celebrates the actual properties of sound, beyond its capacity to dissolve as language. By "dissolve" I mean that when we listen or read, we often don't even notice the subtle properties of the words we're noticing, instead processing them as abstracted from their physicality. That's a narrow view (after all, what about the visual elements) but it's the best description of why the form is remarkable. You can't smash up a bunch of perfectly clear windows, put them together, and suddenly have stained glass (an artwork that you can't look "through" so much as look "at"). But somehow, a corresponding process happens all the time in YTP.

What is done with this language? The easiest to understand, at least for me, is ventriloquy. Many a YTP has made a pundit hoist themselves on their own petard. Just a few days ago DaThings, the greatest to ever do it, made an advertisement for the video game Tomodachi Life say:

Looks like you will enjoy Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream for a total of seven days! Once you get bored after just a single week, you can try a different game!

Anyone with any critical training could tell you why this is meaningful. Slightly harder to pin down are the other things you can do with sentence mixing: making someone tell a story, or say something pragmatically suspect. Most fascinating is when an artist makes a character say a sentence that you and I might think nothing of in our daily lives. An example from cs188:

Having the Internet in our home has had a great impact in our lives.

This is a dull sentence when transcribed. But in the YTP, there's something interesting about it, virtuosic even. The seams are visible; we can see how much of the sentence is constructed from the /ɪn/ sound in Internet. It's harder to talk about why this is so enjoyable, because there's not a theme or a thesis to latch onto, but clearly it is.

But neither of these are the move we think of when we think of YTP: the phatic, or the asemic, or the interjection, or whatever you want to call it when a character says something like "SuS" or "FreerF" or even

let's get reEAR / BoJack wants to get reEAR!! / Cancel the BUP! BORP! buPub!

There's no good human-readable way to transcribe that phrase accurately. That's the thing that's interesting about it — the artist has injected their own rhythms into someone else's practice. I'm saying rhythms, by the way, because I care so much about the sound element; a novelist might say "their own voice into someone else's images".

That's the fundamental paradox of the form. One one hand, you're surrendering your ego in the hopes of having a conversation with the text you're cutting up; on the other hand, since the extant text already exists, it's vital to provide your own ego. You have to deconstruct the idea of art coming from "outside" or "inside", and you have to do it by making Homer Simpson or whoever say "pee" or "SuS".

Bob Dylan ends his Nobel lecture by saying:

"I return once again to Homer, who says, 'Sing in me, O Muse, and through me tell the story.'"

There are two phrases that stand out to me. The first is "sing" — a kind of speech that transcends what we can meaningfully write down or summarize. The second is "return once again". There's a sort of pluperfection to the redundancy there, once that implies he's in a constant cycle of going and returning, the near-universal artistic technique of "tension and release". In YTPs, we combine these ideas. We forcibly revisit the same quotidian words — "we", "you", "I" — and view them as specific instances, as sounds rather than abstractions. I return once again to the words, I sing in them, and through them tell the story.